← The shelf
microbiome classifier
Did its thingReading disease out of gut bacteria: a neural network over 1,094 microbial abundance features, with SMOTE fixing a brutally imbalanced dataset.
✳ How it actually works
FIG 1 · the rebalance, animated — fake the minorities until the net can count
FIG 2 · the machinery — imbalanced samples → SMOTE → deep classifier → CV score
The story
A PharmaHacks-era challenge: 7,840 gut-microbiome samples, each described by 1,094 bacterial abundance features, labelled healthy or one of three disease classes — with healthy samples outnumbering the rarest disease six to one.
The imbalance is the real boss fight. SMOTE synthesizes minority-class samples to level the classes, and a feedforward network (1,094 → 500 → 175 → 75 → 4-way softmax) does the classifying. Ten-fold cross-validation landed at F1 ≈ 0.905 with decision trees, KNN, SVM, and naive Bayes baselines left behind in sibling folders as the receipts.