Cross-Table Pretraining towards a Universal Function Space for Heterogeneous Tabular Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Chen, Jintai, Lin, Zhen, Chen, Qiyuan, Sun, Jimeng
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Chen, Jintai
Lin, Zhen
Chen, Qiyuan
Sun, Jimeng
author_facet Chen, Jintai
Lin, Zhen
Chen, Qiyuan
Sun, Jimeng
contents Tabular data from different tables exhibit significant diversity due to varied definitions and types of features, as well as complex inter-feature and feature-target relationships. Cross-dataset pretraining, which learns reusable patterns from upstream data to support downstream tasks, have shown notable success in various fields. Yet, when applied to tabular data prediction, this paradigm faces challenges due to the limited reusable patterns among diverse tabular datasets (tables) and the general scarcity of tabular data available for fine-tuning. In this study, we fill this gap by introducing a cross-table pretrained Transformer, XTFormer, for versatile downstream tabular prediction tasks. Our methodology insight is pretraining XTFormer to establish a "meta-function" space that encompasses all potential feature-target mappings. In pre-training, a variety of potential mappings are extracted from pre-training tabular datasets and are embedded into the "meta-function" space, and suited mappings are extracted from the "meta-function" space for downstream tasks by a specified coordinate positioning approach. Experiments show that, in 190 downstream tabular prediction tasks, our cross-table pretrained XTFormer wins both XGBoost and Catboost on 137 (72%) tasks, and surpasses representative deep learning models FT-Transformer and the tabular pre-training approach XTab on 144 (76%) and 162 (85%) tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_00281
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cross-Table Pretraining towards a Universal Function Space for Heterogeneous Tabular Data
Chen, Jintai
Lin, Zhen
Chen, Qiyuan
Sun, Jimeng
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Tabular data from different tables exhibit significant diversity due to varied definitions and types of features, as well as complex inter-feature and feature-target relationships. Cross-dataset pretraining, which learns reusable patterns from upstream data to support downstream tasks, have shown notable success in various fields. Yet, when applied to tabular data prediction, this paradigm faces challenges due to the limited reusable patterns among diverse tabular datasets (tables) and the general scarcity of tabular data available for fine-tuning. In this study, we fill this gap by introducing a cross-table pretrained Transformer, XTFormer, for versatile downstream tabular prediction tasks. Our methodology insight is pretraining XTFormer to establish a "meta-function" space that encompasses all potential feature-target mappings. In pre-training, a variety of potential mappings are extracted from pre-training tabular datasets and are embedded into the "meta-function" space, and suited mappings are extracted from the "meta-function" space for downstream tasks by a specified coordinate positioning approach. Experiments show that, in 190 downstream tabular prediction tasks, our cross-table pretrained XTFormer wins both XGBoost and Catboost on 137 (72%) tasks, and surpasses representative deep learning models FT-Transformer and the tabular pre-training approach XTab on 144 (76%) and 162 (85%) tasks.
title Cross-Table Pretraining towards a Universal Function Space for Heterogeneous Tabular Data
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.00281