An alternative SMOTE oversampling strategy for high-dimensional datasets

Abstract In this work, the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) approach is adapted for high-dimensional binary settings. A novel distance metric is proposed for the computation of the neighborhood for each minority sample, which takes into account only a subset of the available attributes that are relevant for the task. Three variants for the distance metric are explored: Euclidean, Manhattan, and Chebyshev distances, and four different ranking strategies: Fisher Score, Mutual Information, Eigenvector Centrality, and Correlation Score. Our proposal was compared with various oversampling techniques on low- and high-dimensional datasets with the presence of class-imbalance, including a case study on Natural Language Processing (NLP). The proposed oversampling strategy showed superior results on average when compared with SMOTE and other variants, demonstrating the importance of selecting the right attributes when defining the neighborhood in SMOTE-based oversampling methods.