Binning as a Pretext Task: Improving Self-Supervised Learning in Tabular Domains

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Lee, Kyungeun, Sim, Ye Seul, Cho, Hye-Seung, Eo, Moonjung, Yoon, Suhee, Yoon, Sanghyu, Lim, Woohyung
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Lee, Kyungeun
Sim, Ye Seul
Cho, Hye-Seung
Eo, Moonjung
Yoon, Suhee
Yoon, Sanghyu
Lim, Woohyung
author_facet Lee, Kyungeun
Sim, Ye Seul
Cho, Hye-Seung
Eo, Moonjung
Yoon, Suhee
Yoon, Sanghyu
Lim, Woohyung
contents The ability of deep networks to learn superior representations hinges on leveraging the proper inductive biases, considering the inherent properties of datasets. In tabular domains, it is critical to effectively handle heterogeneous features (both categorical and numerical) in a unified manner and to grasp irregular functions like piecewise constant functions. To address the challenges in the self-supervised learning framework, we propose a novel pretext task based on the classical binning method. The idea is straightforward: reconstructing the bin indices (either orders or classes) rather than the original values. This pretext task provides the encoder with an inductive bias to capture the irregular dependencies, mapping from continuous inputs to discretized bins, and mitigates the feature heterogeneity by setting all features to have category-type targets. Our empirical investigations ascertain several advantages of binning: capturing the irregular function, compatibility with encoder architecture and additional modifications, standardizing all features into equal sets, grouping similar values within a feature, and providing ordering information. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse tabular datasets corroborate that our method consistently improves tabular representation learning performance for a wide range of downstream tasks. The codes are available in https://github.com/kyungeun-lee/tabularbinning.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_07414
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Binning as a Pretext Task: Improving Self-Supervised Learning in Tabular Domains
Lee, Kyungeun
Sim, Ye Seul
Cho, Hye-Seung
Eo, Moonjung
Yoon, Suhee
Yoon, Sanghyu
Lim, Woohyung
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The ability of deep networks to learn superior representations hinges on leveraging the proper inductive biases, considering the inherent properties of datasets. In tabular domains, it is critical to effectively handle heterogeneous features (both categorical and numerical) in a unified manner and to grasp irregular functions like piecewise constant functions. To address the challenges in the self-supervised learning framework, we propose a novel pretext task based on the classical binning method. The idea is straightforward: reconstructing the bin indices (either orders or classes) rather than the original values. This pretext task provides the encoder with an inductive bias to capture the irregular dependencies, mapping from continuous inputs to discretized bins, and mitigates the feature heterogeneity by setting all features to have category-type targets. Our empirical investigations ascertain several advantages of binning: capturing the irregular function, compatibility with encoder architecture and additional modifications, standardizing all features into equal sets, grouping similar values within a feature, and providing ordering information. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse tabular datasets corroborate that our method consistently improves tabular representation learning performance for a wide range of downstream tasks. The codes are available in https://github.com/kyungeun-lee/tabularbinning.
title Binning as a Pretext Task: Improving Self-Supervised Learning in Tabular Domains
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07414