step_smotenc: Apply SMOTENC Algorithm

In themis: Extra Recipes Steps for Dealing with Unbalanced Data

Apply SMOTENC Algorithm

Description

step_smotenc() creates a specification of a recipe step that generate new examples of the minority class using nearest neighbors of these cases. Gower's distance is used to handle mixed data types. For categorical variables, the most common category along neighbors is chosen.

Usage

step_smotenc(
  recipe,
  ...,
  role = NA,
  trained = FALSE,
  column = NULL,
  over_ratio = 1,
  neighbors = 5,
  indicator_column = NULL,
  skip = TRUE,
  seed = sample.int(10^5, 1),
  id = rand_id("smotenc")
)

Arguments

recipe	A recipe object. The step will be added to the sequence of operations for this recipe.
...	One or more selector functions to choose which variable is used to sample the data. See recipes::selections for more details. The selection should result in single factor variable. For the tidy method, these are not currently used.
role	Not used by this step since no new variables are created.
trained	A logical to indicate if the quantities for preprocessing have been estimated.
column	A character string of the variable name that will be populated (eventually) by the ... selectors.
over_ratio	A numeric value for the ratio of the minority-to-majority frequencies. The default value (1) means that all other levels are sampled up to have the same frequency as the most occurring level. A value of 0.5 would mean that the minority levels will have (at most) (approximately) half as many rows as the majority level. A named numeric vector can be used instead to give different levels different targets, for example c(a = 1, b = 0.5). The names must be levels of the outcome and the values are ratios of the majority level, exactly as in the single-number case. Levels that are not named are left untouched, as are rows with a missing outcome. Because a vector of targets is not a single value, supplying one means this argument can no longer be tuned. See vignette("ratio", package = "themis") for more details.
neighbors	An integer. Number of nearest neighbor that are used to generate the new examples of the minority class.
indicator_column	A single string or NULL (the default). If a string is given, a logical column with that name is added to the output, marking rows added by the step (TRUE) vs rows from the original data (FALSE).
skip	A logical. Should the step be skipped when the recipe is baked by bake()? While all operations are baked when prep() is run, some operations may not be able to be conducted on new data (e.g. processing the outcome variable(s)). Care should be taken when using skip = TRUE as it may affect the computations for subsequent operations.
seed	An integer that will be used as the seed when applied.
id	A character string that is unique to this step to identify it.

Details

SMOTENC extends SMOTE to handle data sets with a mix of numeric and categorical predictors. For each minority class example, new synthetic examples are generated by interpolating between the example and its nearest neighbors using Gower's distance. Numeric features are interpolated continuously; categorical features take the most common value among the neighbors. The number of new examples generated is controlled by over_ratio.

All columns in the data are sampled and returned by recipes::juice() and recipes::bake().

Columns can be numeric and categorical with no missing data.

When used in modeling, users should strongly consider using the option skip = TRUE so that the extra sampling is not conducted outside of the training set.

Value

An updated version of recipe with the new step added to the sequence of existing steps (if any). For the tidy method, a tibble with columns terms which is the variable used to sample.

Minimum observations

Each minority class must have at least neighbors + 1 observations to perform the SMOTENC algorithm.

Tidying

When you tidy() this step, a tibble is returned with columns terms and id:

terms

character, the selectors or variables selected

id

character, id of this step

Tuning Parameters

This step has 2 tuning parameters:

• over_ratio: Over-Sampling Ratio (type: double, default: 1)

• neighbors: # Nearest Neighbors (type: integer, default: 5)

Case weights

The underlying operation does not allow for case weights. Supplying data with a case weights column to this step results in an error.

References

Chawla, N. V., Bowyer, K. W., Hall, L. O., and Kegelmeyer, W. P. (2002). Smote: Synthetic minority over-sampling technique. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 16:321-357.

Gower, J. C. (1971). A general coefficient of similarity and some of its properties. Biometrics 27(4):857-871. (For the distance metric used)

See Also

smotenc() for direct implementation

Other Steps for over-sampling: step_adasyn(), step_bsmote(), step_kmeans_smote(), step_rose(), step_smogn(), step_smote(), step_smoten(), step_svmsmote(), step_upsample()

Examples

library(recipes)
library(modeldata)
data(hpc_data)

orig <- count(hpc_data, class, name = "orig")
orig

up_rec <- recipe(class ~ ., data = hpc_data) |>
  # Bring the minority levels up to about 1000 each
  # 1000/2211 is approx 0.4523
  step_smotenc(class, over_ratio = 0.4523) |>
  prep()

training <- up_rec |>
  bake(new_data = NULL) |>
  count(class, name = "training")
training

# Since `skip` defaults to TRUE, baking the step has no effect
baked <- up_rec |>
  bake(new_data = hpc_data) |>
  count(class, name = "baked")
baked

# Note that if the original data contained more rows than the
# target n (= ratio * majority_n), the data are left alone:
orig |>
  left_join(training, by = "class") |>
  left_join(baked, by = "class")

themis documentation built on Aug. 2, 2026, 9:07 a.m.