How do you handle imbalanced datasets in classification problems?
Instruction: Discuss strategies for dealing with imbalanced datasets to improve model performance on minority classes.
Context: This question assesses the candidate's ability to apply techniques like resampling, using different evaluation metrics, or applying algorithmic approaches to address data imbalance.
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I start by asking whether the imbalance is actually creating a decision problem. Sometimes a dataset is imbalanced but the model still performs well on the minority class. Other times the model looks good overall and fails badly on exactly the class I care about...