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.
The paper compares one-hot encoding to Naïve Bayes for categorical variables.
problem Incorrect one-hot encoding affects Naïve Bayes performance.
method Mathematical and experimental analysis of PoB vs. categorical Naïve Bayes.
result Posterior probabilities are usually greater in the PoB case, but agree on the maximum a posteriori class label.
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…
Enhanced Bayesian target encoding uses sampling techniques to improve model performance.
problem Improving target encoding for better model performance in machine learning.
method Using sampling techniques in Bayesian target encoding to extract intra-category distribution information.
result Improves generalization and reduces target leakage in machine learning models.
Quasi-orthonormal encoding reduces high dimensionality for categorical data.
problem High dimensionality and low sample size issues in categorical data encoding.
method Quasi-orthonormal encoding (QOE) for categorical data.
result QOE reduces dimensionality and improves machine learning performance.
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…
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…
This paper proposes a method to reduce complexity in GLMs with categorical predictors.
problem Wasteful, hard-to-interpret, and prone to overfitting of traditional one-hot encoding for high-cardinality categorical predictors.
method Clustering categories of categorical predictors through a numerical method that preserves or improves accuracy while reducing the number of coefficients.
result Clustering categories of categorical predictors reduces complexity substantially without harming accuracy.
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.
A new method for Gaussian process regression with categorical inputs.
problem Challenges in building a predictive and computationally efficient Gaussian process with categorical inputs.
method Distributional encoding based on maximum mean discrepancy and Wasserstein distance.
result State-of-the-art predictive performance on various datasets.
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.
This study compares and evaluates categorical kernels for Gaussian process regression.
problem Challenges in designing effective categorical kernels for Gaussian process regression.
method Reproducible comparative study of existing kernels, new evaluation metrics, and clustering-based nested kernels.
result Nested kernels outperform other methods, especially when group structure is unknown or unknown.
Neural networks encode inputs deterministically and categorically, behaving like hash encoders.
problem Understanding the encoding properties of neural networks.
method Analyzed the input space partitioned by ReLU-like activations in neural networks.
result Neural networks can be represented by unique activation patterns, similar to hash encoders.
StructureBoost improves gradient boosting for complex categorical variables efficiently.
problem Efficiently handling complex categorical variables with known structure.
method Two methods to overcome computational obstacles in SCDT enumeration for structured categorical variables.
result StructureBoost outperforms existing packages on complex categorical problems.
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.
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.
Many learning algorithms require categorical data to be transformed into real vectors before it can be used as input. Often, categorical variables are encoded as one-hot (or dummy) vectors. However, this mode of representation can be wasteful since it adds many low-signal regressors, especially when the number of uniqu…
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.
flexBART improves BART for categorical predictors by creating flexible tree partitions.
problem Limitation of BART in handling categorical predictors with one-hot encoding.
method flexBART re-implements BART with regression trees that can assign multiple levels to both branches of a decision tree node, and proposes a new decision rule prior for spatial data.
result flexBART often yields improved predictive performance and scales better to larger datasets than existing BART implementations.
nTreeClus clusters categorical sequences using tree-based learners and k-mers.
problem Challenges in clustering categorical and sequential data.
method nTreeClus uses Tree-based Learners, k-mers, and autoregressive models for categorical time series.
result nTreeClus outperformed baseline methods in various validation metrics.
Paper introduces Categorical Normalizing Flows for better handling of categorical data.
problem Limited application of normalizing flows on categorical data due to lack of intrinsic order.
method Categorical Normalizing Flows use continuous transformations to model latent relations in categorical data, optimizing both continuous representation and model likelihood.
result GraphCNF, a permutation-invariant generative model, outperforms state-of-the-art on molecule generation.
Paper proposes GANs for generating business process suffixes and remaining times.
problem Generating accurate suffixes and remaining times for business process models.
method Encoder-decoder GAN architecture with Gumbel-Softmax distribution for categorical sequences.
result The approach outperforms baselines in suffix and remaining time prediction accuracy.
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.
In this work we present Discrete Attend Infer Repeat (Discrete-AIR), a Recurrent Auto-Encoder with structured latent distributions containing discrete categorical distributions, continuous attribute distributions, and factorised spatial attention. While inspired by the original AIR model andretaining AIR model's capabi…
Boosting trees predict Twitch subscriptions from user activity.
problem Predicting Twitch user subscriptions from activity data.
method Used boosting trees and target-encodings for high cardinality categoricals.
result User activity can be better predicted than content alone.
Imputation with missing-indicators improves machine learning performance, especially for categorical attributes.
problem Missing values in datasets can be lost through imputation, potentially reducing model performance.
method Combines missing-indicator approach with imputation strategies on real datasets.
result Missing-indicators generally increase classification performance, especially for categorical attributes.
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.
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…
Improves Group Lasso for categorical data by reducing dimensionality and selecting models.
problem Sparse modelling of categorical data is challenging, especially for high dimensions.
method Two-step procedure: first, reduce dimensionality using Group Lasso; second, select final model using an information criterion on clustered levels.
result The method produces a sparse solution and performs better than state-of-the-art algorithms in prediction accuracy and model dimension.
Reduces high granularity and dimensionality in hierarchical categorical variables.
problem Overfitting and estimation issues in predictive models due to high granularity and dimensionality.
method Entity embedding and top-down clustering algorithm to reduce granularity and dimensionality.
result The reduced hierarchy improves model fit and complexity balance.
New optimization algorithm for mixed-variable problems improves efficiency.
problem Optimizing functions with both continuous and categorical variables.
method Combines radial basis function and metric stochastic response surface methods with modifications for categorical variables and parallel processing.
result Numerical experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed modifications.
To address the challenge of backpropagating the gradient through categorical variables, we propose the augment-REINFORCE-swap-merge (ARSM) gradient estimator that is unbiased and has low variance. ARSM first uses variable augmentation, REINFORCE, and Rao-Blackwellization to re-express the gradient as an expectation und…
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.
Bayesian Optimization (BO) methods are useful for optimizing functions that are expen- sive to evaluate, lack an analytical expression and whose evaluations can be contaminated by noise. These methods rely on a probabilistic model of the objective function, typically a Gaussian process (GP), upon which an acquisition f…
Missing data imputation can help improve the performance of prediction models in situations where missing data hide useful information. This paper compares methods for imputing missing categorical data for supervised classification tasks. We experiment on two machine learning benchmark datasets with missing categorical…
MMbeddings reduces categorical embeddings by treating them as latent effects, significantly decreasing parameters and mitigating overfitting.
problem Large cardinalities in categorical embeddings lead to high parameter counts and overfitting.
method MMbeddings treats embeddings as latent random effects in a variational autoencoder framework, reducing parameter count and mitigating overfitting.
result MMbeddings consistently outperforms traditional embeddings across various tasks, demonstrating its potential in machine learning applications.
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.
Earth observation embeddings can convert discrete biome maps into continuous representations that better capture ecological variation.
problem Biome maps impose categorical boundaries that compress continuous variation in biotic communities.
method Fit a linear classifier on Earth observation embeddings to predict biome labels.
result Continuous biome representation outperforms discrete biome labels for predicting species occurrence.
CEDA analyzes large categorical datasets using tree geometry and binary codes.
problem Analyzing large categorical datasets with extreme-K samples. method CEDA uses tree geometry and binary codes to analyze categorical data.
result CEDA discovers patterns and evaluates their reliability in large categorical datasets.
We propose a novel approach to train a multi-modal policy from mixed demonstrations without their behavior labels. We develop a method to discover the latent factors of variation in the demonstrations. Specifically, our method is based on the variational autoencoder with a categorical latent variable. The encoder infer…
We show how networks of Wilson lines realize quantum groups U_q(sl(m)), for arbitrary m, in 3d SU(N) Chern-Simons theory. Lifting this construction to foams of surface operators in 4d theory we find that rich structure of junctions is encoded in combinatorics of planar diagrams. For a particular choice of surface opera…
Graphs arise naturally in many real-world applications including social networks, recommender systems, ontologies, biology, and computational finance. Traditionally, machine learning models for graphs have been mostly designed for static graphs. However, many applications involve evolving graphs. This introduces import…
This paper compares methods for handling mixed-attribute data in GFMM neural networks.
problem Handling datasets with mixed features in GFMM neural networks.
method Three main methods: encoding, combining with other classifiers, and specific learning algorithms.
result Encoding methods and combining with decision trees improve GFMM models' performance.
A new method for generative modeling of discrete data using geometric latent subspaces.
problem Learning generative models for discrete data with statistical dependencies.
method Geometric latent-subspace framework in exponential parameter space of product manifolds of categorical distributions.
result Low-dimensional latent space encodes statistical dependencies and accurately models high-dimensional discrete data.
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.
New framework uses cohomology to analyze probabilistic distortions and arbitrage.
problem Analyzing probabilistic distortions and arbitrage in categorical filtrations.
method Transport cohomological framework, simplicial structure, loop effects, holonomy.
result Nontrivial probabilistic distortions and obstructions generated by loops.
MOCA-HESP optimizes high-dimensional combinatorial and mixed spaces using hyper-ellipsoid partitioning.
problem Challenges in optimizing high-dimensional, combinatorial and mixed spaces.
method MOCA-HESP uses hyper-ellipsoid space partitioning with different categorical encoders and multi-armed bandit for adaptive selection.
result MOCA-HESP outperforms existing methods on various synthetic and real-world benchmarks.
DMTG groups tasks for multi-task learning in one shot.
problem Efficiently grouping and training multiple tasks in machine learning.
method Formulates Multi-Task Grouping as a differentiable pruning problem, training all groups simultaneously.
result Significantly improves training efficiency and mitigates objective bias.