Oversampling and overfitting

1. Does oversampling cause overfitting?
2. What is the purpose of oversampling?
3. Can smote cause overfitting?
4. Can oversampling be bad?

Does oversampling cause overfitting?

“the random oversampling may increase the likelihood of overfitting occurring, since it makes exact copies of the minority class examples.

What is the purpose of oversampling?

Oversampling is capable of improving resolution and signal-to-noise ratio, and can be helpful in avoiding aliasing and phase distortion by relaxing anti-aliasing filter performance requirements. A signal is said to be oversampled by a factor of N if it is sampled at N times the Nyquist rate.

Can smote cause overfitting?

Hybridization: SMOTE + Tomek Links

After the oversampling is done by SMOTE, the class clusters may be invading each other's space. As a result, the classifier model will be overfitting.

Can oversampling be bad?

It is very hard to separate two objects reliably at distances smaller than the Nyquist distance. Oversampling can have a negative impact on bleaching and phototoxicity, and should thus be applied with caution.