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Originally, without SMOTE, my ML learning steps go like this:

  1. Feature vectorization
  2. split data into X_train, X_test, y_train, and y_test
  3. use X_train and y_train for machine learning
  4. predict/test on X_test and y_test

I think there are two spots I could inject my SMOTE codes. One is I can inject it before the train/test data split, so that oversampling of minority class takes place in both training and testing data. Like so:

  1. Feature vectorization
  2. SMOTE oversampling
  3. split data into X_train, X_test, y_train, and y_test
  4. use X_train and y_train for machine learning
  5. predict/test on X_test and y_test

I got very good results using the above steps, but I wonder if SMOTE should only be done in the training data, but test on the original testing data set since the latter reflects the real-world distribution of majority and minority class samples. Like so:

  1. Feature vectorization
  2. split data into X_train, X_test, y_train, and y_test
  3. SMOTE done only on X_train and y_train
  4. use X_train_SMOTE and y_train_SMOTE for machine learning
  5. predict/test on X_test and y_test

Which is a better implementation of SMOTE?

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    $\begingroup$ Third method, SMOTE the training set, otherwise your testing sample is then not the "real" data. Confirmed here $\endgroup$
    – R. Prost
    Jan 15, 2018 at 11:17

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