Masked Language Modeling Becomes Conditional Density Estimation for Tabular Data Synthesis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: An, Seunghwan, Woo, Gyeongdong, Lim, Jaesung, Kim, ChangHyun, Hong, Sungchul, Jeon, Jong-June
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author An, Seunghwan
Woo, Gyeongdong
Lim, Jaesung
Kim, ChangHyun
Hong, Sungchul
Jeon, Jong-June
author_facet An, Seunghwan
Woo, Gyeongdong
Lim, Jaesung
Kim, ChangHyun
Hong, Sungchul
Jeon, Jong-June
contents In this paper, our goal is to generate synthetic data for heterogeneous (mixed-type) tabular datasets with high machine learning utility (MLu). Since the MLu performance depends on accurately approximating the conditional distributions, we focus on devising a synthetic data generation method based on conditional distribution estimation. We introduce MaCoDE by redefining the consecutive multi-class classification task of Masked Language Modeling (MLM) as histogram-based non-parametric conditional density estimation. Our approach enables the estimation of conditional densities across arbitrary combinations of target and conditional variables. We bridge the theoretical gap between distributional learning and MLM by demonstrating that minimizing the orderless multi-class classification loss leads to minimizing the total variation distance between conditional distributions. To validate our proposed model, we evaluate its performance in synthetic data generation across 10 real-world datasets, demonstrating its ability to adjust data privacy levels easily without re-training. Additionally, since masked input tokens in MLM are analogous to missing data, we further assess its effectiveness in handling training datasets with missing values, including multiple imputations of the missing entries.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_20602
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Masked Language Modeling Becomes Conditional Density Estimation for Tabular Data Synthesis
An, Seunghwan
Woo, Gyeongdong
Lim, Jaesung
Kim, ChangHyun
Hong, Sungchul
Jeon, Jong-June
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
In this paper, our goal is to generate synthetic data for heterogeneous (mixed-type) tabular datasets with high machine learning utility (MLu). Since the MLu performance depends on accurately approximating the conditional distributions, we focus on devising a synthetic data generation method based on conditional distribution estimation. We introduce MaCoDE by redefining the consecutive multi-class classification task of Masked Language Modeling (MLM) as histogram-based non-parametric conditional density estimation. Our approach enables the estimation of conditional densities across arbitrary combinations of target and conditional variables. We bridge the theoretical gap between distributional learning and MLM by demonstrating that minimizing the orderless multi-class classification loss leads to minimizing the total variation distance between conditional distributions. To validate our proposed model, we evaluate its performance in synthetic data generation across 10 real-world datasets, demonstrating its ability to adjust data privacy levels easily without re-training. Additionally, since masked input tokens in MLM are analogous to missing data, we further assess its effectiveness in handling training datasets with missing values, including multiple imputations of the missing entries.
title Masked Language Modeling Becomes Conditional Density Estimation for Tabular Data Synthesis
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20602