OpenFE: Automated Feature Generation beyond Expert-level Performance

Tianping Zhang, Zheyu Zhang, Haoyan Luo, Fengyuan Liu, Wei Cao, Jian Li

Keywords: tabular data, feature generation

TL;DR: OpenFE: automated feature generation beyond expert-level performance

Abstract: The goal of automated feature generation is to liberate machine learning experts from the laborious task of manual feature generation, which is crucial for improving the learning performance of tabular data. The major challenge in automated feature generation is to efficiently and accurately identify useful features from a vast pool of candidate features. In this paper, we present OpenFE, an automated feature generation tool that provides competitive results against machine learning experts. OpenFE achieves efficiency and accuracy with two components: 1) a novel feature boosting method for accurately estimating the incremental performance of candidate features. 2) a feature-scoring framework for retrieving effective features from a large number of candidates through successive featurewise halving and feature importance attribution. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets show that OpenFE outperforms existing baseline methods. We further evaluate OpenFE in two famous Kaggle competitions with thousands of data science teams participating. In one of the competitions, features generated by OpenFE with a simple baseline model can beat 99.3% data science teams, demonstrating for the first time that automated feature generation can outperform human experts. In addition to the empirical results, we provide a theoretical perspective to show that feature generation has benefit provably in a simple yet representative setting. Codes and datasets are available in the supplementary materials.

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Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2211.12507/code)