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Machine learning‐based code smell detection (CSD) has been demonstrated to be a valuable approach for improving software quality and enabling developers to identify problematic patterns in code. However, previous researches have shown that the code smell datasets commonly used to train these models are heavily imbalanced. While some recent studies have explored the use of imbalanced learning techniques for CSD, they have only evaluated a limited number of techniques and thus their conclusions about the most effective methods may be biased and inconclusive. To thoroughly evaluate the effect of imbalanced learning techniques for machine learning‐based CSD, we examine 31 imbalanced learning techniques with seven classifiers to build CSD models on four code smell data sets. We employ four evaluation metrics to assess the detection performance with the Wilcoxon signed‐rank test and Cliff …