FeatAug: Automatic Feature Augmentation From One-to-Many Relationship
  Tables
Danrui Qi Weiling Zheng Jiannan Wang
Feature augmentation from one-to-many relationship tables is a critical but
challenging problem in ML model development. To augment good features, data
scientists need to come up with SQL queries manually, which is time-consuming.
Featuretools [1] is a widely used tool by the data science community to
automatically augment the training data by extracting new features from
relevant tables. It represents each feature as a group-by aggregation SQL query
on relevant tables and can automatically generate these SQL queries. However,
it does not include predicates in these queries, which significantly limits its
application in many real-world scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we
propose FEATAUG, a new feature augmentation framework that automatically
extracts predicate-aware SQL queries from one-to-many relationship tables. This
extension is not trivial because considering predicates will exponentially
increase the number of candidate queries. As a result, the original
Featuretools framework, which materializes all candidate queries, will not work
and needs to be redesigned. We formally define the problem and model it as a
hyperparameter optimization problem. We discuss how the Bayesian Optimization
can be applied here and propose a novel warm-up strategy to optimize it. To
make our algorithm more practical, we also study how to identify promising
attribute combinations for predicates. We show that how the beam search idea
can partially solve the problem and propose several techniques to further
optimize it. Our experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that
FeatAug extracts more effective features compared to Featuretools and other
baselines. The code is open-sourced at https://github.com/sfu-db/FeatAug