FeatNavigator: Automatic Feature Augmentation on Tabular Data

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Liang, Jiaming, Lei, Chuan, Qin, Xiao, Zhang, Jiani, Katsifodimos, Asterios, Faloutsos, Christos, Rangwala, Huzefa
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866909223576666112
author Liang, Jiaming
Lei, Chuan
Qin, Xiao
Zhang, Jiani
Katsifodimos, Asterios
Faloutsos, Christos
Rangwala, Huzefa
author_facet Liang, Jiaming
Lei, Chuan
Qin, Xiao
Zhang, Jiani
Katsifodimos, Asterios
Faloutsos, Christos
Rangwala, Huzefa
contents Data-centric AI focuses on understanding and utilizing high-quality, relevant data in training machine learning (ML) models, thereby increasing the likelihood of producing accurate and useful results. Automatic feature augmentation, aiming to augment the initial base table with useful features from other tables, is critical in data preparation as it improves model performance, robustness, and generalizability. While recent works have investigated automatic feature augmentation, most of them have limited capabilities in utilizing all useful features as many of them are in candidate tables not directly joinable with the base table. Worse yet, with numerous join paths leading to these distant features, existing solutions fail to fully exploit them within a reasonable compute budget. We present FeatNavigator, an effective and efficient framework that explores and integrates high-quality features in relational tables for ML models. FeatNavigator evaluates a feature from two aspects: (1) the intrinsic value of a feature towards an ML task (i.e., feature importance) and (2) the efficacy of a join path connecting the feature to the base table (i.e., integration quality). FeatNavigator strategically selects a small set of available features and their corresponding join paths to train a feature importance estimation model and an integration quality prediction model. Furthermore, FeatNavigator's search algorithm exploits both estimated feature importance and integration quality to identify the optimized feature augmentation plan. Our experimental results show that FeatNavigator outperforms state-of-the-art solutions on five public datasets by up to 40.1% in ML model performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_09534
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FeatNavigator: Automatic Feature Augmentation on Tabular Data
Liang, Jiaming
Lei, Chuan
Qin, Xiao
Zhang, Jiani
Katsifodimos, Asterios
Faloutsos, Christos
Rangwala, Huzefa
Databases
Machine Learning
Data-centric AI focuses on understanding and utilizing high-quality, relevant data in training machine learning (ML) models, thereby increasing the likelihood of producing accurate and useful results. Automatic feature augmentation, aiming to augment the initial base table with useful features from other tables, is critical in data preparation as it improves model performance, robustness, and generalizability. While recent works have investigated automatic feature augmentation, most of them have limited capabilities in utilizing all useful features as many of them are in candidate tables not directly joinable with the base table. Worse yet, with numerous join paths leading to these distant features, existing solutions fail to fully exploit them within a reasonable compute budget. We present FeatNavigator, an effective and efficient framework that explores and integrates high-quality features in relational tables for ML models. FeatNavigator evaluates a feature from two aspects: (1) the intrinsic value of a feature towards an ML task (i.e., feature importance) and (2) the efficacy of a join path connecting the feature to the base table (i.e., integration quality). FeatNavigator strategically selects a small set of available features and their corresponding join paths to train a feature importance estimation model and an integration quality prediction model. Furthermore, FeatNavigator's search algorithm exploits both estimated feature importance and integration quality to identify the optimized feature augmentation plan. Our experimental results show that FeatNavigator outperforms state-of-the-art solutions on five public datasets by up to 40.1% in ML model performance.
title FeatNavigator: Automatic Feature Augmentation on Tabular Data
topic Databases
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09534