Synthetic Augmentation in Imbalanced Learning: When It Helps, When It Hurts, and How Much to Add
arXiv:2601.16120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Imbalanced classification, where one class is observed far less frequently than the other, often causes standard training procedures to prioritize the majority class and perform poorly on rare but important cases. A classic and widely used remedy is to augment the minority class with synthetic examples, but two basic questions remain under-resolved: when does synthetic augmentation actually help, and how many synthetic samples should be generated? We develop a unified statistical framework for […]