Why Tabular Foundation Models Should Be a Research Priority

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: van Breugel, Boris, van der Schaar, Mihaela
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914818675441664
author van Breugel, Boris
van der Schaar, Mihaela
author_facet van Breugel, Boris
van der Schaar, Mihaela
contents Recent text and image foundation models are incredibly impressive, and these models are attracting an ever-increasing portion of research resources. In this position piece we aim to shift the ML research community's priorities ever so slightly to a different modality: tabular data. Tabular data is the dominant modality in many fields, yet it is given hardly any research attention and significantly lags behind in terms of scale and power. We believe the time is now to start developing tabular foundation models, or what we coin a Large Tabular Model (LTM). LTMs could revolutionise the way science and ML use tabular data: not as single datasets that are analyzed in a vacuum, but contextualized with respect to related datasets. The potential impact is far-reaching: from few-shot tabular models to automating data science; from out-of-distribution synthetic data to empowering multidisciplinary scientific discovery. We intend to excite reflections on the modalities we study, and convince some researchers to study large tabular models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_01147
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Why Tabular Foundation Models Should Be a Research Priority
van Breugel, Boris
van der Schaar, Mihaela
Machine Learning
Recent text and image foundation models are incredibly impressive, and these models are attracting an ever-increasing portion of research resources. In this position piece we aim to shift the ML research community's priorities ever so slightly to a different modality: tabular data. Tabular data is the dominant modality in many fields, yet it is given hardly any research attention and significantly lags behind in terms of scale and power. We believe the time is now to start developing tabular foundation models, or what we coin a Large Tabular Model (LTM). LTMs could revolutionise the way science and ML use tabular data: not as single datasets that are analyzed in a vacuum, but contextualized with respect to related datasets. The potential impact is far-reaching: from few-shot tabular models to automating data science; from out-of-distribution synthetic data to empowering multidisciplinary scientific discovery. We intend to excite reflections on the modalities we study, and convince some researchers to study large tabular models.
title Why Tabular Foundation Models Should Be a Research Priority
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01147