新模型同时学数值与类别数据的依赖关系,提升生成准确性。
Conditional-Independence-Regularized Distributional Autoencoders for Mixed-Type Data

- 用能量评分+似然函数联合建模混合变量,匹配条件分布。
- 在真实与合成数据上显著改善类别变量分布恢复效果。
- 适合需要保留异构变量结构关系的科学数据分析场景。
包含数值型与类别型变量的混合类型数据广泛存在于科研与实际应用中。现有表示学习与生成建模方法通常只关注重建精度或无条件生成,难以完整恢复数据的条件分布,且常忽略异构变量间的可解释结构关系。本文提出条件独立正则化分布自编码器框架,通过条件分布匹配与结构正则化,学习混合类型数据的低维表示。方法结合数值变量的能量-得分目标、类别变量的似然目标,以及辅助的条件独立正则项,以鼓励表示捕捉数值与类别成分间的依赖。理论分析表明最优表示在未解释数值变异、类别变量条件熵与残余条件依赖间取得平衡。实验显示,该方法在合成与真实数据集上表现优异,显著提升类别分布恢复,实现有竞争力的整体条件分布恢复,并有效保持混合类型依赖结构。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Mixed-type data containing both numerical and categorical variables arise in many scientific and real-world applications. Existing representation learning and generative modeling approaches typically focus either on reconstruction accuracy or unconditional data generation, but often fail to recover the full conditional distribution of the data while preserving interpretable structural relationships between heterogeneous variable types. In this work, we introduce Conditional-Independence-Regularized Distributional Autoencoders, a framework for learning low-dimensional representations of mixed-type data through conditional distribution matching and structural regularization. Our method combines an energy-score-based objective for numerical variables, a likelihood-based objective for categorical variables, and an auxiliary conditional independence regularization term encouraging the learned representation to capture the dependence between numerical and categorical components. We provide theoretical analysis showing that the optimal representation balances unexplained numerical variability, conditional entropy of categorical variables, and residual conditional dependence. Empirically, the proposed method achieves strong performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets, substantially improving categorical distribution recovery, achieving competitive overall conditional distribution recovery, and preserving mixed-type dependence structure. The code has been made available at GitHub.
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