Browsing by Author "Marais, Jan Andre"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Deep learning for tabular data : an exploratory study
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-04) Marais, Jan Andre; Bierman, Surette; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. Dept. of Statistics and Actuarial Science.
    ENGLISH SUMMARY : From about 2006, deep learning has proven to be very successul in application areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, speech and audio recognition, machine translation, bioinformatics, and social network filtering. These successes were undoubtedly facilitated by many advances in neural network architectures. In contrast, deep learning has not yet been found to excel in the context of tabular datasets. Many key machine learning tasks make use of tabular data, where currently the best machine learning models for tabular data use classification or regression trees as base learners. Therefore, the objective of this study is to identify, discuss and explore recent developments in deep learning which may be used to enhance the accuracy of deep neural networks in the tabular data domain. All major developments in the deep learning field are discussed and critically considered, with a view to improving deep learning in the context of tabular data. The challenges of applying deep learning to tabular data are identified, and on each of these fronts, potential improvements are proposed. The most promising modern deep learning architectures are further explored by means of empirical work. We also evaluate the validity of findings reported in the literature, and comment on the effectiveness of recent proposals. A useful byproduct of the study is the development of a code base that may be used to implement the latest deep learning techniques, as well as for comparative model selection experiments.