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Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Hengrui, Fang, Liancheng, Wu, Qitian, Yu, Philip S.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21523
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author Zhang, Hengrui
Fang, Liancheng
Wu, Qitian
Yu, Philip S.
author_facet Zhang, Hengrui
Fang, Liancheng
Wu, Qitian
Yu, Philip S.
contents Autoregressive models are predominant in natural language generation, while their application in tabular data remains underexplored. We posit that this can be attributed to two factors: 1) tabular data contains heterogeneous data type, while the autoregressive model is primarily designed to model discrete-valued data; 2) tabular data is column permutation-invariant, requiring a generation model to generate columns in arbitrary order. This paper proposes a Diffusion-nested Autoregressive model (TabDAR) to address these issues. To enable autoregressive methods for continuous columns, TabDAR employs a diffusion model to parameterize the conditional distribution of continuous features. To ensure arbitrary generation order, TabDAR resorts to masked transformers with bi-directional attention, which simulate various permutations of column order, hence enabling it to learn the conditional distribution of a target column given an arbitrary combination of other columns. These designs enable TabDAR to not only freely handle heterogeneous tabular data but also support convenient and flexible unconditional/conditional sampling. We conduct extensive experiments on ten datasets with distinct properties, and the proposed TabDAR outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by 18% to 45% on eight metrics across three distinct aspects.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_21523
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Diffusion-nested Auto-Regressive Synthesis of Heterogeneous Tabular Data
Zhang, Hengrui
Fang, Liancheng
Wu, Qitian
Yu, Philip S.
Machine Learning
Autoregressive models are predominant in natural language generation, while their application in tabular data remains underexplored. We posit that this can be attributed to two factors: 1) tabular data contains heterogeneous data type, while the autoregressive model is primarily designed to model discrete-valued data; 2) tabular data is column permutation-invariant, requiring a generation model to generate columns in arbitrary order. This paper proposes a Diffusion-nested Autoregressive model (TabDAR) to address these issues. To enable autoregressive methods for continuous columns, TabDAR employs a diffusion model to parameterize the conditional distribution of continuous features. To ensure arbitrary generation order, TabDAR resorts to masked transformers with bi-directional attention, which simulate various permutations of column order, hence enabling it to learn the conditional distribution of a target column given an arbitrary combination of other columns. These designs enable TabDAR to not only freely handle heterogeneous tabular data but also support convenient and flexible unconditional/conditional sampling. We conduct extensive experiments on ten datasets with distinct properties, and the proposed TabDAR outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by 18% to 45% on eight metrics across three distinct aspects.
title Diffusion-nested Auto-Regressive Synthesis of Heterogeneous Tabular Data
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21523