Table 3.

Class Imbalance and SMOTE Settings.

Aspect	Details
Imbalance ratio	Minority class: < 15% of total samples
Quantification method	Class frequency count
Oversampling method	SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique)
Library used	imblearn.over_sampling.SMOTE
Nearest neighbors (k)	5
Sampling strategy	‘auto’ (equalizes to majority class size)
Random state	42 (for reproducibility)