Tabular Feature Discovery With Reasoning Type Exploration

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Han, Sungwon, Park, Sungkyu, Lee, Seungeon
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Han, Sungwon
Park, Sungkyu
Lee, Seungeon
author_facet Han, Sungwon
Park, Sungkyu
Lee, Seungeon
contents Feature engineering for tabular data remains a critical yet challenging step in machine learning. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been used to automatically generate new features by leveraging their vast knowledge. However, existing LLM-based approaches often produce overly simple or repetitive features, partly due to inherent biases in the transformations the LLM chooses and the lack of structured reasoning guidance during generation. In this paper, we propose a novel method REFeat, which guides an LLM to discover diverse and informative features by leveraging multiple types of reasoning to steer the feature generation process. Experiments on 59 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach not only achieves higher predictive accuracy on average, but also discovers more diverse and meaningful features. These results highlight the promise of incorporating rich reasoning paradigms and adaptive strategy selection into LLM-driven feature discovery for tabular data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_20357
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tabular Feature Discovery With Reasoning Type Exploration
Han, Sungwon
Park, Sungkyu
Lee, Seungeon
Artificial Intelligence
Feature engineering for tabular data remains a critical yet challenging step in machine learning. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been used to automatically generate new features by leveraging their vast knowledge. However, existing LLM-based approaches often produce overly simple or repetitive features, partly due to inherent biases in the transformations the LLM chooses and the lack of structured reasoning guidance during generation. In this paper, we propose a novel method REFeat, which guides an LLM to discover diverse and informative features by leveraging multiple types of reasoning to steer the feature generation process. Experiments on 59 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach not only achieves higher predictive accuracy on average, but also discovers more diverse and meaningful features. These results highlight the promise of incorporating rich reasoning paradigms and adaptive strategy selection into LLM-driven feature discovery for tabular data.
title Tabular Feature Discovery With Reasoning Type Exploration
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20357