I have an imbalanced dataset with 88 positive samples and 128575 negative samples. I was reluctant to over/undersample the data since it's a biological dataset and I didn't want to introduce synthetic data. I built a Random Forest Classifier with this original dataset. I got an F1 score of 0 for the positive class. Zero precision. Zero recall. I cross-checked the predictions and test data. The model predicts some positives none of which are actually positive. Worst performance.
So, I tried to oversample the positive class. I upsampled the positives to 1000 samples. To my surprise, the F1 score for this dataset was 0.97, for the positive class. Then I tried lesser samples. I was able to achieve an F1 score of 0.83 with 200 positive samples, which is just 2.25 times of the original positive samples.
I would like to know why this occurs. For 88 samples, F1 score is 0.00 (rounded off to two digits). For 200 samples it's 0.83. There is no data leakage. All the features are engineered. I used imbalanced-learn
module for oversampling. Can someone explain why is this difference in performance?