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Rare category

A rare category is a class or entity represented by substantially fewer observations than other categories in a dataset.

How 3 Manning books explain it

Machine Learning for Tabular Data: XGBoost, Deep Learning, and AI

A rare class is a target category represented by a small proportion of observations in a dataset.

How it is used
Flags infrequent categorical values before modeling so they can be treated as a source of potential overfitting.
How deep it goes
Defines rarity, explains its overfitting risk, and recommends aggregation while deferring implementation details to later methods.
Examples
Uses infrequently occurring labels, domain-guided category aggregation, target encoding, and embeddings as concrete treatments.
What you can do after
Apply domain knowledge to aggregate similar rare labels and distinguish that remedy from encodings for high-cardinality features.

Read how Machine Learning for Tabular Data: XGBoost, Deep Learning, and AI explains rare category →

Outlier Detection in Python

A minority class is a class containing substantially fewer observations than the majority class or classes in a classification dataset.

How it is used
Uses imbalanced classification datasets to evaluate outlier detectors against labeled rare classes.
How deep it goes
Defines rarity, explains down-sampling and evaluation trade-offs, but stops short of specifying a detector.
Examples
Uses KDD Cup network attacks and artificially down-sampled classes as rare-category examples.
What you can do after
Evaluate outlier detectors with labeled imbalanced datasets while recognizing masking and project-specific suitability.

Read how Outlier Detection in Python explains rare category →

Delivering Machine Learning Projects: From design to deployment

A rare entity is an infrequently occurring subject, case, or category represented in a data set.

How it is used
Audits data assets for sampling distortion, missing cases, and misleading operational conclusions.
How deep it goes
Explains over-representation, omission, and representativeness risks through a concrete case, without specifying remediation algorithms.
Examples
Uses criminal databases in which serious offenders are recorded more often than petty offenders.
What you can do after
Diagnose whether recorded rare cases can support representative profiles and safe operational interventions.

Read how Delivering Machine Learning Projects: From design to deployment explains rare category →

Related concepts

These guides are generated from the text of Manning books by Manning's knowledge graph and link to the sections they draw on. The full books are available on liveBook and at manning.com.