TabKDE: Simple and Scalable Tabular Data Generation with Kernel Density Estimates

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Alishahi, Meysam, Zheng, Yan, Wang, Junpeng, Yeh, Chin-Chia Michael, Phillips, Jeff M.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Alishahi, Meysam
Zheng, Yan
Wang, Junpeng
Yeh, Chin-Chia Michael
Phillips, Jeff M.
author_facet Alishahi, Meysam
Zheng, Yan
Wang, Junpeng
Yeh, Chin-Chia Michael
Phillips, Jeff M.
contents Tabular data generation considers a large table with multiple columns -- each column comprised of numerical, categorical, or sometimes ordinal values. The goal is to produce new rows for the table that replicate the distribution of rows from the original data -- without just copying those initial rows. The last 4 years have seen enormous progress on this problem, mostly using computational expensive methods that employ one-hot encoding, VAEs, and diffusion. This paper describes a new approach to the problem of tabular data generation. By employing copula transformations and modeling the distribution as a kernel density estimate we can nearly match the accuracy and leakage-avoidance achievements of the previous methods, but with almost no training time. Our method is very scalable, and can be run on data sets orders of magnitude larger than prior state-of-the-art on a simple laptop. Moreover, because we employ kernel density estimates, we can store the model as a coreset of the original data -- we believe the first for generative modeling -- and as a result, require significantly less space as well. Our code is available here: \url{https://github.com/tabkde/tabkde-main}
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_17642
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TabKDE: Simple and Scalable Tabular Data Generation with Kernel Density Estimates
Alishahi, Meysam
Zheng, Yan
Wang, Junpeng
Yeh, Chin-Chia Michael
Phillips, Jeff M.
Machine Learning
Tabular data generation considers a large table with multiple columns -- each column comprised of numerical, categorical, or sometimes ordinal values. The goal is to produce new rows for the table that replicate the distribution of rows from the original data -- without just copying those initial rows. The last 4 years have seen enormous progress on this problem, mostly using computational expensive methods that employ one-hot encoding, VAEs, and diffusion. This paper describes a new approach to the problem of tabular data generation. By employing copula transformations and modeling the distribution as a kernel density estimate we can nearly match the accuracy and leakage-avoidance achievements of the previous methods, but with almost no training time. Our method is very scalable, and can be run on data sets orders of magnitude larger than prior state-of-the-art on a simple laptop. Moreover, because we employ kernel density estimates, we can store the model as a coreset of the original data -- we believe the first for generative modeling -- and as a result, require significantly less space as well. Our code is available here: \url{https://github.com/tabkde/tabkde-main}
title TabKDE: Simple and Scalable Tabular Data Generation with Kernel Density Estimates
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17642