Mambular: A Sequential Model for Tabular Deep Learning

19 Sept 2024 (modified: 05 Feb 2025)Submitted to ICLR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Tabular Deep Learning, Mamba, Sequential Models, SSM, Recurrent Neural Networks
Abstract: The analysis of tabular data has traditionally been dominated by gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDTs), known for their proficiency with mixed categorical and numerical features. However, recent deep learning innovations are challenging this dominance. We introduce Mambular, an adaptation of the Mamba architecture optimized for tabular data. We extensively benchmark Mambular against state-of-the-art models, including neural networks and tree-based methods, and demonstrate its competitive performance across diverse datasets. Additionally, we explore various adaptations of Mambular to understand its effectiveness for tabular data. We investigate different pooling strategies, feature interaction mechanisms, and bi-directional processing. Our analysis shows that interpreting features as a sequence and passing them through Mamba layers results in surprisingly performant models. The results highlight Mambular’s potential as a versatile and powerful architecture for tabular data analysis, expanding the scope of deep learning applications in this domain. The source code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/mamba-tabular-485F/
Primary Area: other topics in machine learning (i.e., none of the above)
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Submission Number: 1879
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