Revisiting Nearest Neighbor for Tabular Data: A Deep Tabular Baseline Two Decades Later

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Main Authors: Ye, Han-Jia, Yin, Huai-Hong, Zhan, De-Chuan, Chao, Wei-Lun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Ye, Han-Jia
Yin, Huai-Hong
Zhan, De-Chuan
Chao, Wei-Lun
author_facet Ye, Han-Jia
Yin, Huai-Hong
Zhan, De-Chuan
Chao, Wei-Lun
contents The widespread enthusiasm for deep learning has recently expanded into the domain of tabular data. Recognizing that the advancement in deep tabular methods is often inspired by classical methods, e.g., integration of nearest neighbors into neural networks, we investigate whether these classical methods can be revitalized with modern techniques. We revisit a differentiable version of $K$-nearest neighbors (KNN) -- Neighbourhood Components Analysis (NCA) -- originally designed to learn a linear projection to capture semantic similarities between instances, and seek to gradually add modern deep learning techniques on top. Surprisingly, our implementation of NCA using SGD and without dimensionality reduction already achieves decent performance on tabular data, in contrast to the results of using existing toolboxes like scikit-learn. Further equipping NCA with deep representations and additional training stochasticity significantly enhances its capability, being on par with the leading tree-based method CatBoost and outperforming existing deep tabular models in both classification and regression tasks on 300 datasets. We conclude our paper by analyzing the factors behind these improvements, including loss functions, prediction strategies, and deep architectures. The code is available at https://github.com/qile2000/LAMDA-TALENT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_03257
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Nearest Neighbor for Tabular Data: A Deep Tabular Baseline Two Decades Later
Ye, Han-Jia
Yin, Huai-Hong
Zhan, De-Chuan
Chao, Wei-Lun
Machine Learning
The widespread enthusiasm for deep learning has recently expanded into the domain of tabular data. Recognizing that the advancement in deep tabular methods is often inspired by classical methods, e.g., integration of nearest neighbors into neural networks, we investigate whether these classical methods can be revitalized with modern techniques. We revisit a differentiable version of $K$-nearest neighbors (KNN) -- Neighbourhood Components Analysis (NCA) -- originally designed to learn a linear projection to capture semantic similarities between instances, and seek to gradually add modern deep learning techniques on top. Surprisingly, our implementation of NCA using SGD and without dimensionality reduction already achieves decent performance on tabular data, in contrast to the results of using existing toolboxes like scikit-learn. Further equipping NCA with deep representations and additional training stochasticity significantly enhances its capability, being on par with the leading tree-based method CatBoost and outperforming existing deep tabular models in both classification and regression tasks on 300 datasets. We conclude our paper by analyzing the factors behind these improvements, including loss functions, prediction strategies, and deep architectures. The code is available at https://github.com/qile2000/LAMDA-TALENT.
title Revisiting Nearest Neighbor for Tabular Data: A Deep Tabular Baseline Two Decades Later
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03257