TabMT: Generating tabular data with masked transformers
Manbir S Gulati Paul F Roysdon
Autoregressive and Masked Transformers are incredibly effective as generative
models and classifiers. While these models are most prevalent in NLP, they also
exhibit strong performance in other domains, such as vision. This work
contributes to the exploration of transformer-based models in synthetic data
generation for diverse application domains. In this paper, we present TabMT, a
novel Masked Transformer design for generating synthetic tabular data. TabMT
effectively addresses the unique challenges posed by heterogeneous data fields
and is natively able to handle missing data. Our design leverages improved
masking techniques to allow for generation and demonstrates state-of-the-art
performance from extremely small to extremely large tabular datasets. We
evaluate TabMT for privacy-focused applications and find that it is able to
generate high quality data with superior privacy tradeoffs.