SuperTML: Two-Dimensional Word Embedding for the Precognition on Structured Tabular Data

Tabular data is the most commonly used form of data in industry according to a Kaggle ML and DS Survey. Gradient Boosting Trees, Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression are typically used for classification tasks on tabular data. DNN models using categorical embeddings are also applied in this task, but all attempts thus far have used one-dimensional embeddings. The recent work of Super Characters method using two-dimensional word embeddings achieved state-of-the-art results in text classification tasks, showcasing the promise of this new approach. In this paper, we propose the SuperTML method, which borrows the idea of Super Characters method and two-dimensional embeddings to address the problem of classification on tabular data. For each input of tabular data, the features are first projected into two-dimensional embeddings like an image, and then this image is fed into fine-tuned two-dimensional CNN models for classification. The proposed SuperTML method handles the categorical data and missing values in tabular data automatically, without any need to pre-process into numerical values. Comparisons of model performance are conducted on one of the largest and most active competitions on the Kaggle platform, as well as on the top three most popular data sets in the UCI Machine Learning Repository. Experimental results have shown that the proposed SuperTML method have achieved state-of-the-art results on both large and small datasets.