TFWT: Tabular Feature Weighting with Transformer

TFWT: Tabular Feature Weighting with Transformer

Xinhao Zhang, Zaitian Wang, Lu Jiang, Wanfu Gao, Pengfei Wang, Kunpeng Liu

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2570-2578. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/284

In this paper, we propose a novel feature weighting method to address the limitation of existing feature processing methods for tabular data. Typically the existing methods assume equal importance across all samples and features in one dataset. This simplified processing methods overlook the unique contributions of each feature, and thus may miss important feature information. As a result, it leads to suboptimal performance in complex datasets with rich features. To address this problem, we introduce Tabular Feature Weighting with Transformer, a novel feature weighting approach for tabular data. Our method adopts Transformer to capture complex feature dependencies and contextually assign appropriate weights to discrete and continuous features. Besides, we employ a reinforcement learning strategy to further fine-tune the weighting process. Our extensive experimental results across various real-world datasets and diverse downstream tasks show the effectiveness of TFWT and highlight the potential for enhancing feature weighting in tabular data analysis.
Keywords:
Data Mining: DM: Applications
Machine Learning: ML: Feature extraction, selection and dimensionality reduction