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I am working on some TV series data, so the number of records is very limited. I have 58 instances, one for each existing episode, which I have randomly split in 45 and 13. The main goal is to make a classification over five classes.

In order to make everything even worse, the data was unbalanced:

Feature    Dim
---------+-----
Class 1  | 24
Class 2  | 15
Class 3  |  7
Class 4  |  7
Class 5  |  5

This is why I applied SMOTE to the training data, but this keeps me with the problem of having a very small testing dataset. In fact, this is how the test data is distributed:

Feature    Dim
---------+-----
Class 1  |  5
Class 2  |  3
Class 3  |  2
Class 4  |  2
Class 5  |  1

How can I measure performance on such little data? I can't tell how many "Class 5" elements it is able to recognize, because there is just one element.

Is there a way to handle this?

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    $\begingroup$ This will require a large amount of background reading as you have violated a whole variety of statistical principles. Sorry to not have good news. Check out RMS and fharrell.com/post/classification and note that the minimum sample size for data splitting to work well as a validation method is on the order of n=20,000. You're too subject to "the luck of the split" and are using methods that are harmed by imbalance. Good methods are not hurt by imbalance except for having a lower effective sample size that makes standard errors larger. $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 21, 2022 at 23:15
  • $\begingroup$ Do you have data about one single TV series? In other words, what is the population of TV series that you are studying? $\endgroup$
    – dipetkov
    Commented Jun 22, 2022 at 23:45
  • $\begingroup$ @dipetkov Thank you for your interest. I have the data about each existing episode of a tv series, 58 episodes $\endgroup$
    – Jonathan
    Commented Jun 22, 2022 at 23:48
  • $\begingroup$ I'm not sure I understand what problem you are trying to solve. Is this series going to have more seasons? If the series is concluded, then why are you building a classification model? $\endgroup$
    – dipetkov
    Commented Jun 22, 2022 at 23:53
  • $\begingroup$ It's not really anything that will be used, it is to demonstrate that it could be possible to forecast the popularity of an episode by using some features extracted from scripts/video $\endgroup$
    – Jonathan
    Commented Jun 22, 2022 at 23:55

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Train/test split sounds like a bad idea indeed. I'd try jackknife resampling/LeaveOneOut cross-validation for this case.

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