What is the purpose of StratifiedKFold cross-validation and when is it preferred over regular KFold?

Question

Data Science with Python — Hard

What is the purpose of StratifiedKFold cross-validation and when is it preferred over regular KFold?

Accepted Answer

StratifiedKFold is preferred over regular KFold for imbalanced classification problems because it ensures each fold maintains the same class distribution as the full dataset, preventing biased evaluation.