Zero-Complement Extrapolation: Parameter Recovery and Classification in Severely Imbalanced Logistic Regression under Rank-Deficient Regimes

Abstract

Parameter estimation and classification in binary logistic regression deteriorate severely when the number of minority class observations ($n_1$) is smaller than the feature dimension ($p$). Under such rank-deficient rarity ($n_1 < p$), maximum likelihood estimators suffer from quasi-complete separation, penalized likelihood methods exhibit severe intercept bias, and convex minority oversampling techniques such as SMOTE collapse into an $(n_1 - 1)$-dimensional affine subspace. In this paper, we propose a novel \textit{Self-Calibrated Zero-Complement} estimator that shifts the paradigm from minority interpolation to majority fringe extrapolation. Grounded in Stein's Lemma, we prove that the conditional expectation shift of the abundant majority class ($Y=0$) induced by logistic truncation uniquely identifies the true hyperplane normal $\boldsymbolβ$ after Mahalanobis whitening. We further establish that extrapolating synthetic minority instances outward from the high-quantile density fringe of the majority distribution along the conjugate direction preserves full-rank covariance regularity ($\mathrm{rank} = p$). To accommodate both semi-supervised environments (with an unlabeled background mean) and strictly supervised subsamples, we introduce a hybrid estimator incorporating the intrinsic third-moment skewness of the majority class alongside a location-shift-invariant zero-boundary intercept calibration. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations and real-world benchmark applications (Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer and Banknote Authentication) under extreme rarity ($n_1 \in \{3, 5\}$) demonstrate that our approach prevents parameter divergence, recovers the oracle hyperplane with high fidelity, and substantially outperforms Firth's regression and SMOTE in F1-score and estimation stability.