DEBOHID: A differential evolution based oversampling approach for highly imbalanced datasets

•A novel oversampling method based on a DEBOHID is presented.•SVM, k-NN, and DT are used as a classifier.•The independence of the experimental results to the classifier is showed.•AUC and G-Mean are used as performance metrics for determining the performance.•The experiments have shown the superiority of DEBOHID for rare events detection.