Why is it when I run the smote function in R, an error appears saying that my target variable is not found? I am using the smotefamily package to run this smote function.

tv_smote <- SMOTE(tv_smote, Churn, K = 5, dup_size = 0)

Error in table(target) : object 'Churn' not found

Chunk Codes

CodePudding user response：

Generally, you should include the minimum code and data needed to reproduce the problem. This saves time and gives you more chance of getting an answer. However, try this...

tv_smote <- SMOTE(tv_smote, tv_smote$Churn, K = 5, dup_size = 0)

CodePudding user response：

I can get the same error by doing this:

library(smotefamily)

df <- data.frame(x = 1:8, y = 8:1)

df_smote <- SMOTE(df, y, K = 3, dup_size = 0)

It appears to me that SMOTE doesn't know y is a column name. In the documentation, ?SMOTE, it says that the target argument is "A vector of a target class attribute corresponding to a dataset X." My interpretation of this is that you need to supply a vector, not a name. Changing it to df_smote <- SMOTE(df, df$y, K = 3, dup_size = 0) gets past that part.

I am not familiar with the SMOTE function, but from testing it would appear that SMOTE cannot accept dataframes with any factor type columns. I get Error in get.knnx(data, query, k, algorithm) : Data non-numeric when using as.factor.