LLM生成的表格特征过于简单,影响模型性能。
Large Language Models Engineer Too Many Simple Features For Tabular Data
- 通过分析特征操作频率,发现LLM偏爱加法等简单操作
- 在27个数据集上,简单操作占比超80%,复杂操作严重缺失
- 适合关注自动化特征工程的机器学习实践者
表格机器学习任务通常需要耗时且繁琐的特征工程。近期研究尝试利用大语言模型(LLMs)的领域知识来提升自动化程度。然而,在文本生成等场景中已发现伦理问题相关的负面偏差。这促使我们探究LLMs在特征工程中是否存在可能降低性能的偏差。为此,我们提出一种方法,通过检测LLMs建议的新特征中操作符(如两个特征相加)的频率异常来识别潜在偏差。实验评估了四个LLM(两个大型前沿模型和两个小型开源模型)在27个表格数据集上的表现。结果表明,LLMs显著偏向于简单操作(如加法),而忽视更复杂的操作(如分组后聚合)。这种偏差导致使用生成特征时预测性能下降。研究呼吁在使用LLMs进行特征工程时应主动缓解此类偏差。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Tabular machine learning problems often require time-consuming and labor-intensive feature engineering. Recent efforts have focused on using large language models (LLMs) to capitalize on their potential domain knowledge. At the same time, researchers have observed ethically concerning negative biases in other LLM-related use cases, such as text generation. These developments motivated us to investigate whether LLMs exhibit a bias that negatively impacts the performance of feature engineering. While not ethically concerning, such a bias could hinder practitioners from fully utilizing LLMs for automated data science. Therefore, we propose a method to detect potential biases by detecting anomalies in the frequency of operators (e.g., adding two features) suggested by LLMs when engineering new features. Our experiments evaluate the bias of four LLMs, two big frontier and two small open-source models, across 27 tabular datasets. Our results indicate that LLMs are biased toward simple operators, such as addition, and can fail to utilize more complex operators, such as grouping followed by aggregations. Furthermore, the bias can negatively impact the predictive performance when using LLM-generated features. Our results call for mitigating bias when using LLMs for feature engineering.
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