Classification of imbalanced data is a vastly explored issue of the last and present decade and still keeps the same importance because data are an essential term today and it becomes crucial when data are distributed into several classes. The term imbalance refers to uneven distribution of data into classes that severely affects the performance of traditional classifiers, that is, classifiers become biased toward the class having larger amount of data. The data generated from wireless sensor networks will have several imbalances. This review article is a decent analysis of imbalance issue for wireless sensor networks and other application domains, which will help the community to understand WHAT, WHY, and WHEN of imbalance in data and its remedies. © The Author(s) 2020.