Table Transformers for imputing textual attributes
Ting-Ruen Wei, Yuan Wang, Yoshitaka Inoue, Hsin-Tai Wu, Yi Xiang Fang · Pattern Recognition Letters · 2024
Missing data in tabular dataset is a common issue as the performance of downstream tasks usually depends on the completeness of the training dataset. Previous missing data imputation methods focus on numeric and categorical columns, but we propose a novel end-to-end approach called Table Transformers for Imputing Textual Attributes (TTITA) based on the transformer to impute unstructured textual columns using other columns in the table. We conduct extensive experiments on three datasets, and our approach shows competitive performance outperforming baseline models such as recurrent neural networks and Llama2. The performance improvement is more significant when the target sequence has a longer length. Additionally, we incorporate multi-task learning to simultaneously impute for heterogeneous columns, boosting the performance for text imputation. We also qualitatively compare with ChatGPT for realistic applications. • Proposed TTITA to impute text attributes given other heterogeneous tabular columns. • Encoded inputs into a context vector for cross-attention in the transformer decoder. • Outperformed baseline models including the GRU and Llama2 on real-world datasets. • Incorporated multi-task learning for multi-column imputation and boosting performance. • Prepared the software as an open-source package for custom applications.