The paper proposes a method to analyze categorical feature interactions in large datasets using graph covariance and LLMs.
problem Analyzing complex datasets with numerous categorical features and timestamps.
method Binarization of categorical features using one-hot encoding, computation of graph covariance, identifying significant feature pairs, and using LLMs to generate explanations.
result The method identifies meaningful feature pairs and potential data stories underlying categorical feature interactions.
A novel graph spectral method for mixed categorical and numerical data.
problem Feature learning for mixed data types (numerical and categorical).
method Graph spectral decomposition of the graph Laplacian to model probabilistic dependence structure.
result Increased separability and clusterability of observations in the transformed feature space.
The paper shows how integrating categorical semantics can enhance unsupervised domain translation.
problem Improving unsupervised domain translation between perceptually different domains.
method Learning invariant categorical semantic features in an unsupervised manner and conditioning them on the style encoder.
result Conditioning the style encoder on learned categorical semantics improves translation and stylization.
Probabilistic hash embeddings improve online learning of categorical features.
problem Online learning of categorical features with changing vocabulary.
method Probabilistic hash embedding (PHE) with Bayesian online learning.
result PHE mitigates forgetting and maintains high performance in online settings.
Applied Data Scientists throughout various industries are commonly faced with the challenging task of encoding high-cardinality categorical features into digestible inputs for machine learning algorithms. This paper describes a Bayesian encoding technique developed for WeWork's lead scoring engine which outputs the pro…
In this paper, we present a new wrapper feature selection approach based on Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence, termed feature selection with maximum JS-divergence (FSMJ), for text categorization. Unlike most existing feature selection approaches, the proposed FSMJ approach is based on real-valued features which provide mo…
Novel GLMMNet model tackles high-cardinality categorical features in actuarial applications.
problem Inadequate encoding methods for high-cardinality categorical features in actuarial data.
method Generalised Linear Mixed Model Neural Network (GLMMNet) integrating a generalised linear mixed model in a deep learning framework.
result GLMMNet often outperforms or performs comparably with entity embedded neural networks, providing transparency.
CatGCN improves GCNs by modeling feature interactions for categorical node features.
problem Suboptimal initial node representations in GCNs due to lack of feature interaction modeling.
method Integrates explicit interaction modeling (local and global) into initial node representation learning for categorical node features.
result CatGCN enhances initial node representations through feature interaction modeling, leading to improved model performance.
We propose a method to train generative adversarial networks on mutivariate feature vectors representing multiple categorical values. In contrast to the continuous domain, where GAN-based methods have delivered considerable results, GANs struggle to perform equally well on discrete data. We propose and compare several …
Unsupervised clustering can reproduce categorization systems if features and metrics are correctly selected.
problem Reproducing expert-provided categorization systems using unsupervised clustering.
method Investigated using toy datasets and real-world fund categorization. Used appropriate feature selection and a supervised Random Forest-based distance metric.
result Unsupervised clustering can reproduce ground truth classes if features and metrics are correctly selected.
The study analyzes decision trees on real and categorical features, deriving bounds on their VC dimension and proposing improved pruning algorithms.
problem Understanding the generalization properties of decision trees on different types of features.
method Introducing partitioning functions, relating them to growth functions and VC dimension, and deriving bounds for decision stumps and trees of various structures.
result Exact VC dimension of decision stumps and improved pruning algorithms for binary trees.
CardiCat generates synthetic data for high-cardinality tabular datasets.
problem Learning complexities of high-cardinality categorical features in tabular data.
method Substitutes one-hot encoding with regularized dual encoder-decoder embedding layers.
result Generates high-quality synthetic data with a smaller parameter space.
Natural Language Processing models help encode categorical process inputs.
problem Encoding categorical variables in industrial process modeling.
method Using NLP models for categorical variable encoding, combined with dimensionality reduction.
result Meaningful embeddings of categorical variables improve feature importance.
Stratified models are models that depend in an arbitrary way on a set of selected categorical features, and depend linearly on the other features. In a basic and traditional formulation a separate model is fit for each value of the categorical feature, using only the data that has the specific categorical value. To thi…
Automated feature selection is important for text categorization to reduce the feature size and to speed up the learning process of classifiers. In this paper, we present a novel and efficient feature selection framework based on the Information Theory, which aims to rank the features with their discriminative capacity…
Decision forests learn to model text by evaluating categorical-set conditions.
problem Decision forests cannot directly model text features.
method Defined and learned conditions for categorical-set features, enabling efficient text modeling.
result Decision forests can now directly model text features.
Develops 2-categorical methods for multi-parameter persistence.
problem Fundamental limitations of traditional persistence modules.
method 2-categorical structures to capture hierarchical interactions.
result New invariants effectively characterize multidimensional topological features.
Baseline injury categorization is important to traumatic brain injury (TBI) research and treatment. Current categorization is dominated by symptom-based scores that insufficiently capture injury heterogeneity. In this work, we apply unsupervised clustering to identify novel TBI phenotypes. Our approach uses a generaliz…
In this paper we present CatBoost, a new open-sourced gradient boosting library that successfully handles categorical features and outperforms existing publicly available implementations of gradient boosting in terms of quality on a set of popular publicly available datasets. The library has a GPU implementation of lea…
Random Intersection Chains selects important interactions from categorical features.
problem Heavy computational burden in considering all interactions for categorical features.
method Randomly generates chains of intersections, estimates and selects frequent patterns.
result Selected patterns are the most frequent in the data set.
This research compares two encoding methods for categorical attributes in machine learning, affecting model fairness.
problem The impact of encoding protected categorical attributes on fairness in machine learning models.
method Comparison of one-hot encoding and target encoding methods.
result Target encoding can lead to more unfair models compared to one-hot encoding due to induced bias.
ctsfeatures R package analyzes categorical time series data.
problem Lack of tools for analyzing categorical time series data.
method Provides functions for extracting statistical features and constructing graphs.
result Package enables traditional machine learning tasks on categorical time series.
Improved isolation forest for better outlier detection.
problem Outlier detection in multivariate data.
method Random cuts across feature space, size of feature space, and point assignment information.
result Improved results in many situations without modifying tree structure.
DPERC efficiently estimates covariance matrices for mixed data with missing values.
problem Estimating covariance matrices for datasets with missing values and mixed features.
method Direct Parameter Estimation for Randomly Missing Data with Categorical Features (DPERC).
result DPERC outperforms other methods in estimating covariance matrices for mixed data with missing values.
Decision trees have been a very popular class of predictive models for decades due to their interpretability and good performance on categorical features. However, they are not always robust and tend to overfit the data. Additionally, if allowed to grow large, they lose interpretability. In this paper, we present a mix…
Statistical models usually require vector representations of categorical variables, using for instance one-hot encoding. This strategy breaks down when the number of categories grows, as it creates high-dimensional feature vectors. Additionally, for string entries, one-hot encoding does not capture information in their…
Interprets neural network classifiers for categorical inputs.
problem Neural networks' interpretability in human-sensitive applications.
method Mapping to physical energy model, expansion of neural network layers.
result Each layer's contribution to classification can be analyzed.
We consider analysis of relational data (a matrix), in which the rows correspond to subjects (e.g., people) and the columns correspond to attributes. The elements of the matrix may be a mix of real and categorical. Each subject and attribute is characterized by a latent binary feature vector, and an inferred matrix map…
New framework detects outliers in non-IID categorical data.
problem Existing outlier detection methods fail in non-IID data.
method Value-value graph-based representation and outlierness propagation.
result Significant improvement in AUC on complex data sets.
We solve the ANOVA decomposition for categorical inputs.
problem Lack of a closed-form expression for ANOVA decomposition with categorical dependent variables.
method Bridge functional analysis with discrete Fourier analysis to derive a closed-form decomposition.
result Closed-form decomposition for categorical inputs without assumptions.
Cluster analysis is one of the essential tasks in data mining and knowledge discovery. Each type of data poses unique challenges in achieving relatively efficient partitioning of the data into homogeneous groups. While the algorithms for numeric data are relatively well studied in the literature, there are still challe…
Regularized target encoding beats traditional methods for high cardinality features in ML.
problem Efficiently encoding high cardinality categorical variables for ML algorithms.
method Regularized target encoding compared to traditional encodings like integer and one-hot encoding.
result Regularized target encoding consistently provided the best results in a large-scale benchmark experiment.
Adaptive regularization prevents overfitting in large-scale sparse feature models.
problem Overfitting in models with large-scale sparse categorical features.
method Adaptive regularization of embedding layers' norm budget.
result Improves model performance within a single epoch and prevents multi-epoch performance degradation.
This paper compares preprocessing techniques for XGBoost models on various data sets.
problem Improving predictive performance of XGBoost models through optimal data preprocessing.
method Comparison of feature selection, categorical handling, and null imputation methods.
result XGBoost importance by gain is the most consistent and highest-performing method for feature selection.
Proposes novel losses for fine-grained categorical domain adaptation.
problem Fine-grained alignment of categories across domains in unsupervised domain adaptation.
method Joint category-domain classifier with adversarial training losses for both domain and category levels, and vicinal domain adaptation.
result Achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets.
ForecastGAN improves multi-horizon time series forecasting by integrating numerical and categorical features.
problem Limited performance of existing approaches in short-term and long-term forecasting.
method Decomposition, model selection, adversarial training.
result ForecastGAN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art transformer models for short-term forecasting.
Method reduces categorical data to lower dimensions using density matrices.
problem Dimensionality reduction for categorical data.
method Density-matrix construction from class-conditional frequencies; spectral embedding.
result Low-dimensional spectral embeddings with controlled rank.
A new method generates mixed-type features in tabular data with improved realism and accuracy.
problem Generating mixed-type features combining discrete and continuous data is challenging.
method A cascaded approach: first generates low-resolution categorical and coarse numerical features, then uses these in a high-resolution flow matching model.
result The model significantly improves detection scores, generating more realistic samples and capturing distributional details.
Domain adaptation has become a prominent problem setting in machine learning and related fields. This review asks the question: how can a classifier learn from a source domain and generalize to a target domain? We present a categorization of approaches, divided into, what we refer to as, sample-based, feature-based and…
Most of the parameters in large vocabulary models are used in embedding layer to map categorical features to vectors and in softmax layer for classification weights. This is a bottle-neck in memory constraint on-device training applications like federated learning and on-device inference applications like automatic spe…
We propose a single neural probabilistic model based on variational autoencoder that can be conditioned on an arbitrary subset of observed features and then sample the remaining features in "one shot". The features may be both real-valued and categorical. Training of the model is performed by stochastic variational Bay…
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task in online display advertising. The data involved in CTR prediction are typically multi-field categorical data, i.e., every feature is categorical and belongs to one and only one field. One of the interesting characteristics of such data is that features from one fi…
In the era of big data, learning from categorical features with very large vocabularies (e.g., 28 million for the Criteo click prediction dataset) has become a practical challenge for machine learning researchers and practitioners. We design a highly-scalable vocabulary compression algorithm that seeks to maximize the …
Spectral clustering adapted for mixed data types without preprocessing.
problem Clustering mixed data types (numerical and categorical).
method Adding extra nodes for categories, leading to a linear-time algorithm.
result Linear-time spectral clustering for categorical-only data.
Benchmarking AutoML for tables with text fields, achieving top performance.
problem Evaluating automated learning systems for tables with text fields.
method Publicly available benchmark with 18 datasets varying in size, types, and feature composition.
result Stack ensembling a multimodal Transformer with various tree models achieved top performance.
For statistical learning, categorical variables in a table are usually considered as discrete entities and encoded separately to feature vectors, e.g., with one-hot encoding. "Dirty" non-curated data gives rise to categorical variables with a very high cardinality but redundancy: several categories reflect the same ent…
SNI framework for mixed-type data imputation interprets and explains missing values.
problem Missing data in mixed-type databases skew analysis results.
method SNI couples statistical priors with neural attention to impute and explain missing values.
result SNI provides interpretable feature dependency diagnostics and soft regularization of attention.
Extends linear representation hypothesis to categorical and hierarchical concepts in LLMs.
problem Representing concepts without natural contrasts in large language models.
method Formalizes linear representation hypothesis for categorical and hierarchical concepts, proving relationships between concept hierarchy and representation geometry.
result Validated theoretical results on large language models, estimating representations for 900+ concepts.