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REaLTabFormer: Generate Realistic Relational and Tabular Data using Transformers (arxiv.org)
2 points by avsolatorio on Feb 15, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Builds a fake parent table row by row with a language model, then creates the linked child tables from it while blocking the model from copying real rows. On real datasets it preserved the links between tables better than the usual baseline approach.

Abstract · REaLTabFormer: Generating Realistic Relational and Tabular Data using Transformers

Tabular data is a common form of organizing data. Multiple models are available to generate synthetic tabular datasets where observations are independent, but few have the ability to produce relational datasets. Modeling relational data is challenging as it requires modeling both a "parent" table and its relationships across tables. We introduce REaLTabFormer (Realistic Relational and Tabular Transformer), a tabular and relational synthetic data generation model. It first creates a parent table using an autoregressive GPT-2 model, then generates the relational dataset conditioned on the parent table using a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model. We implement target masking to prevent data copying and propose the $Q_δ$ statistic and statistical bootstrapping to detect overfitting. Experiments using real-world datasets show that REaLTabFormer captures the relational structure better than a baseline model. REaLTabFormer also achieves state-of-the-art results on prediction tasks, "out-of-the-box", for large non-relational datasets without needing fine-tuning.

Aivin V. Solatorio, Olivier Dupriez
arXiv:2302.02041 · cs.LG · submitted Feb 4, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · REaLTabFormer GitHub repository at https://github.com/avsolatorio/REaLTabFormer

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