2024/06/13 by Jiaming Liang, Chuan Lei, Liang, Jiaming +11
Computer Science · #Databases (cs.DB) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Image Retrieval and Classification Techniques #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Video Analysis and Summarization #Web Data Mining and Analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2406.09534
openalex publication_date 2024/06/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Data-centric AI focuses on understanding and utilizing high-quality, relevant data in training machine learning (ML) models, thereby increasing the likelihood of producing accurate and useful results. Automatic feature augmentation, aiming to augment the initial base table with useful features from other tables, is critical in data preparation as it improves model performance, robustness, and generalizability. While recent works have investigated automatic feature augmentation, most of them have limited capabilities in utilizing all useful features as many of them are in candidate tables not directly joinable with the base table. Worse yet, with numerous join paths leading to these distant features, existing solutions fail to fully exploit them within a reasonable compute budget. We present FeatNavigator, an effective and efficient framework that explores and integrates high-quality features in relational tables for ML models. FeatNavigator evaluates a feature from two aspects: (1) the intrinsic value of a feature towards an ML task (i.e., feature importance) and (2) the efficacy of a join path connecting the feature to the base table (i.e., integration quality). FeatNavigator strategically selects a small set of available features and their corresponding join paths to train a feature importance estimation model and an integration quality prediction model. Furthermore, FeatNavigator's search algorithm exploits both estimated feature importance and integration quality to identify the optimized feature augmentation plan. Our experimental results show that FeatNavigator outperforms state-of-the-art solutions on five public datasets by up to 40.1% in ML model performance.