Enhancing Clinical Predictive Modeling through Model Complexity-Driven Class Proportion Tuning for Class Imbalanced Data: An Empirical Study on Opioid Overdose Prediction

Class imbalance issues are prevalent in the medical field and significantly impact the performance of clinical predictive models. Traditional techniques to address this challenge aim to rebalance class proportions. They generally assume that the rebalanced proportions are derived from the original data, without considering the intricacies of the model utilized. This study challenges the prevailing assumption and introduces a new method that ties the optimal class proportions to model complexity. This approach allows for individualized tuning of class proportions for each model. Our experiments, centered on the opioid overdose prediction problem, highlight the performance gains achieved by this approach. Furthermore, rigorous regression analysis affirms the merits of the proposed theoretical framework, demonstrating a statistically significant correlation between hyperparameters controlling model complexity and the optimal class proportions.