# How to perform SMOTE-N when there is no majority vote?

In the SMOTE paper, the authors present the logic of creating synthetic examples when all features are nominal (section 6.2, SMOTE-N):

To generate new minority class feature vectors, we can create new set feature values by taking the majority vote of the feature vector in consideration and its k nearest neighbors

Along with this example:

Let F1 = A B C D E be the feature vector under consideration and let its 2 nearest neighbors be

F2 = A F C G N

F3 = H B C D N

The application of SMOTE-N would create the following feature vector: FS = A B C D N

How would FS be chosen in the case that F3 = H B C I N? How does Value Difference Metric by Cost and Salzberg described in the paper assist in this case?

I don't know what "VDM" stands for, but a simple solution for tie breaking is to randomly pick one of the tied options.

• Edited my question - VDM: Value Difference Metric by Cost and Salzberg described in the paper. See the paper by C&S: cs.utsa.edu/~bylander/cs6243/cost93weighted.pdf – shakedzy Jan 7 '18 at 22:44
• I guess I'll have to email the authors of the paper.. in the meantime, your answer seems legit :) – shakedzy Jan 7 '18 at 22:46