How to analyse imbalanced categorical colum in dataset

Question

Hello,

I have a dataset with a categorical column that contains three categories. One of the categories represents 98% of the data, while the remaining 2% are distributed between the other two categories, with a few (maybe around 50) in each. It is worth mentioning that the output for these 50 rows is the same, which suggests that these data points may be important.

However, the data is obviously imbalanced, and I am unable to perform any analysis. Should I drop the entire column, or perform a chi-square test on the data as-is?

Answer 1

For imbalanced categorical data, you shouldn't drop the column. Instead, you can try techniques like oversampling the minority class or using models that handle imbalanced data well, like XGBoost. This way, you can still extract useful insights without losing important information.