You are building a binary classification model using AutoML Tables on Vertex AI. The dataset has a severe class imbalance (1% positive class). Which strategy should you use to handle the imbalance?
AutoML Tables allows setting class weights to address imbalance; it will adjust the loss function accordingly.
Why this answer
The correct option is D: use a weight column in AutoML Tables to assign higher weights to the minority class. In Vertex AI AutoML Tables, you can add a weight column to the training data and specify it as the weight column, so minority-class rows contribute more to the loss. This directly counteracts the 1% positive-class imbalance without changing the data distribution.
Options A and C are not supported preprocessing steps in AutoML Tables, since it manages data splitting and training internally and does not expose SMOTE or manual downsampling. Option B is incorrect because AutoML Tables does not automatically correct severe class imbalance; you must supply weights or adjust the optimization objective. Option D is therefore the appropriate, supported mechanism for this scenario.
Exam trap
Confusing scikit-learn/XGBoost-style class_weight parameters with Vertex AI AutoML Tables, which instead uses a dataset weight column to handle class imbalance.