IFC-HFlowVAE: A self-enhancing generative framework with structural anchoring for imbalanced clinical data augmentation

Lu Yuwen and Shuyu Chen

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 9, 1-23

Abstract: Class imbalance and limited minority-class samples remain major challenges for developing reliable clinical diagnostic models, as insufficient observations often fail to capture complex minority-class distributions. Existing augmentation methods either rely on heuristic interpolation or suffer from instability when learning sparse and heterogeneous medical tabular data. This study proposes IFC-HFlowVAE, an iterative feedback and consensus framework built upon a flow-enhanced heterogeneous variational autoencoder for minority-class data generation. The proposed framework first models mixed-type clinical attributes through HFlowVAE and then introduces a self-circulating refinement strategy to progressively improve generated samples. To alleviate degradation during iterative refinement, SMOTE-generated samples are incorporated as structural references, followed by a localized GMM-based refinement procedure that guides samples toward more representative minority-class regions. Comprehensive experiments on seven clinical tabular datasets demonstrate that IFC-HFlowVAE improves downstream classification performance compared with existing augmentation approaches. Furthermore, fidelity analyses show that the proposed framework better preserves challenging minority-class characteristics, particularly skewed and multimodal numerical distributions.

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0357260

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0357260

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