Tabula

The code is for paper TabuLa: Harnessing Language Models for Tabular Data Synthesis. Tabula improves tabular data synthesis by leveraging language model structures without the burden of pre-trained model weights. It offers a faster training process by preprocessing tabular datato shorten token sequence, which sharply reducing training time while consistently delivering higher-quality synthetic data.

Prerequisite

Tabula requires Python version >= 3.9, we have need the library versions to be:

datasets >= 2.5.2
numpy >= 1.24.2
pandas >= 1.4.4
scikit_learn >= 1.1.1
torch >= 1.10.2
tqdm >= 4.64.1
transformers >= 4.22.1

Tabula quickstart

Follow the python notebook Tabula_on_insurance_dataset.ipynb for a training example with Insurance dataset. The Insurance dataset is also provided within the code. We do not hold the copyright of the dataset, the original dataset can also be download here. To download the pre-trained model on intrusion dataset as used in the paper, download here . Do not forget to create a folder pretrained-model and put the downloaded model inside.

Problems about generation

Since we published the code, we received several emails or open issues on the generation using Tabula folder. The problem is related to the max_length argument in sample function. The default length is 100, but the encoded data is longer than 100 tokens for a dataset with a large number of columns. In that case, users need to increase this number to allow Tabula to generate enough length of tokens for each row.

Acknowledgement

Our code adapts the training structure of GReaT. Also thanks HuggingFace for their LLM model.

Citation

Please use following bibtex to cite this paper:

@misc{zhao2023tabula,
      title={TabuLa: Harnessing Language Models for Tabular Data Synthesis}, 
      author={Zilong Zhao and Robert Birke and Lydia Chen},
      year={2023},
      eprint={2310.12746},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.LG}
}