Investigating the Synthetic Minority class Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) on an imbalanced cardiovascular disease (CVD) dataset

In this work, we employ the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) to generate instances of the minority class of an imbalanced Coronary Artery Disease dataset. We firstly analyze the public dataset Z -- Alizadeh Sani, a dataset used for non-invasive prediction of CAD. We perform feature selection to exclude attributes unrelated to Coronary Artery Disease risk. The generation of new samples is performed using SMOTE, a technique commonly employed in machine learning tasks. We design Artificial Neural Networks, Decision Trees, and Support Vector Machines to classify both the original dataset and the augmented. The results demonstrate that data augmentation may be beneficial in specific cases, but it is not a panacea, and its application in a specific dataset should be carefully examined.