Tabular data, which accounts for over 80% of enterprise data assets, is vital in various fields. With growing concerns about privacy protection and data-sharing restrictions, generating high-quality synthetic tabular data has become essential. Recent advancements show that large language models (LLMs) can effectively generate realistic tabular data by leveraging semantic information and overcoming the challenges of high-dimensional data that arise from one-hot encoding. However, current methods do not fully utilize the rich information available in tables. To address this, we introduce AI Generative Table based on prompt enhancement, a novel approach that utilizes metadata information, such as table descriptions and schemas, as prompts to generate ultra-high-quality synthetic data. To overcome the token limit constraints of LLMs, we propose long-token partitioning algorithms that enable AIGT to model tables of any scale. AIGT achieves state-of-the-art performance on 14 out of 20 public datasets and two real industry datasets within the Alipay risk control system.

Tabular data pervades the landscape of the World Wide Web, playing a foundational role in the digital architecture that underpins online information. Given the recent influence of large-scale pretrained models like ChatGPT and SAM across various domains, exploring the application of pretraining techniques for mining tabular data on the web has emerged as a highly promising research direction. Indeed, there have been some recent works around this topic where most (if not all) of them are limited in the scope of a fixed-schema/single table. Due to the scale of the dataset and the parameter size of the prior models, we believe that we have not reached the ''BERT moment'' for the ubiquitous tabular data. The development on this line significantly lags behind the counterpart research domains such as natural language processing. In this work, we first identify the crucial challenges behind tabular data pretraining, particularly overcoming the cross-table hurdle. As a pioneering endeavor, this work mainly (i)-contributes a high-quality real-world tabular dataset, (ii)-proposes an innovative, generic, and efficient cross-table pretraining framework, dubbed as CM2, where the core to it comprises a semantic-aware tabular neural network that uniformly encodes heterogeneous tables without much restriction and (iii)-introduces a novel pretraining objective --- prompt Masked Table Modeling (pMTM) --- inspired by NLP but intricately tailored to scalable pretraining on tables. Our extensive experiments demonstrate CM2's state-of-the-art performance and validate that cross-table pretraining can enhance various downstream tasks.

Feature engineering often plays a crucial role in building mining systems for tabular data, which traditionally requires experienced human experts to perform. Thanks to the rapid advances in reinforcement learning, it has offered an automated alternative, i.e. automated feature engineering (AutoFE). In this work, through scrutiny of the prior AutoFE methods, we characterize several research challenges that remained in this regime, concerning system-wide efficiency, efficacy, and practicality toward production. We then propose Catch, a full-fledged new AutoFE framework that comprehensively addresses the aforementioned challenges. The core to Catch composes a hierarchical-policy reinforcement learning scheme that manifests a collaborative feature engineering exploration and exploitation grounded on the granularity of the whole feature set. At a higher level of the hierarchy, a decision-making module controls the post-processing of the attained feature engineering transformation. We extensively experiment with Catch on 26 academic standardized tabular datasets and 9 industrialized real-world datasets. Measured by numerous metrics and analyses, Catch establishes a new state-of-the-art, from perspectives performance, latency as well as its practicality towards production. Source code1 can be found at https://github.com/1171000709/Catch.

BACKGROUND: Single-cell RNA sequencing can be used to fairly determine cell types, which is beneficial to the medical field, especially the many recent studies on COVID-19. Generally, single-cell RNA data analysis pipelines include data normalization, size reduction, and unsupervised clustering. However, different normalization and size reduction methods will significantly affect the results of clustering and cell type enrichment analysis. Choices of preprocessing paths is crucial in scRNA-Seq data mining, because a proper preprocessing path can extract more important information from complex raw data and lead to more accurate clustering results. RESULTS: We proposed a method called NDRindex (Normalization and Dimensionality Reduction index) to evaluate data quality of outcomes of normalization and dimensionality reduction methods. The method includes a function to calculate the degree of data aggregation, which is the key to measuring data quality before clustering. For the five single-cell RNA sequence datasets we tested, the results proved the efficacy and accuracy of our index. CONCLUSIONS: This method we introduce focuses on filling the blanks in the selection of preprocessing paths, and the result proves its effectiveness and accuracy. Our research provides useful indicators for the evaluation of RNA-Seq data.

Background: Single-cell RNA sequencing can be used to determine cell types in an unbiased way. Normally, the analysis pipeline of single-cell RNA data includes data n ormalization, dimension reduction and unsupervised clustering. However, different normalization and dimension reduction methods will influence the results of clustering and cell type enrichment analysis significantly. Choices of preprocessing paths is crucial in scRNA-Seq data mining because an appropriate preprocessing path can extract more important information from complex raw data and lead to a more accurate clustering result. Results: We propose a method called NDRindex(Normalization and Dimensionality Reduction index) to evaluate single-cell RNA-seq data quality. The method includes a function that calculates the degree of aggregation of data, which is the key to benchmarking data quality before clustering. For five single-cell RNA sequencing data sets we tested, the result shows the effectiveness and the accuracy of our index. Conclusions: This method we introduce focuses on filling the blanks in the selection of preprocessing paths and the result proves its effectiveness and accuracy. Our study provides a useful indicator for RNA-Seq data assessment.