Description: The distribution of the target variable in a dataset refers to how the values of the variable that is to be predicted or classified in a supervised learning model are distributed. This distribution is fundamental to understanding the nature of the problem being addressed, as it influences the choice of algorithms, data preparation, and model evaluation. A balanced distribution can facilitate model learning, while a skewed distribution can lead to poor performance. For example, in a binary classification problem, if most instances belong to one class and only a few to the other, the model may learn to predict the majority class with high accuracy but fail to identify the minority class. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze the distribution of the target variable to apply appropriate sampling techniques, weight adjustments, or evaluation metric selections that better reflect the model’s performance across all classes. Additionally, visualizing this distribution through histograms or density plots can provide valuable insights into the presence of outliers, data normality, and the need for further transformations before training the model.
