TableDC: Deep Clustering for Tabular Data

TL;DR

TableDC introduces a deep clustering algorithm tailored for tabular data, leveraging Mahalanobis distance and heavy-tailed distributions to improve clustering accuracy, robustness, and scalability in data management tasks.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel deep clustering method for tabular data that effectively handles overlapping clusters, outliers, and large cluster numbers, tailored for data management applications.

Findings

Outperforms existing deep clustering and standard methods on benchmark datasets.

Provides higher tolerance to outliers and overlapping clusters.

Scales efficiently with large numbers of clusters.

Abstract

Deep clustering (DC), a fusion of deep representation learning and clustering, has recently demonstrated positive results in data science, particularly text processing and computer vision. However, joint optimization of feature learning and data distribution in the multi-dimensional space is domain-specific, so existing DC methods struggle to generalize to other application domains (such as data integration and cleaning). In data management tasks, where high-density embeddings and overlapping clusters dominate, a data management-specific DC algorithm should be able to interact better with the data properties for supporting data cleaning and integration tasks. This paper presents a deep clustering algorithm for tabular data (TableDC) that reflects the properties of data management applications, particularly schema inference, entity resolution, and domain discovery. To address overlapping clusters, TableDC integrates Mahalanobis distance, which considers variance and correlation within the data, offering a similarity method suitable for tables, rows, or columns in high-dimensional latent spaces. TableDC provides flexibility for the final clustering assignment and shows higher tolerance to outliers through its heavy-tailed Cauchy distribution as the similarity kernel. The proposed similarity measure is particularly beneficial where the embeddings of raw data are densely packed and exhibit high degrees of overlap. Data cleaning tasks may involve a large number of clusters, which affects the scalability of existing DC methods. TableDC's self-supervised module efficiently learns data embeddings with a large number of clusters compared to existing benchmarks, which scale in quadratic time. We evaluated TableDC with several existing DC, Standard Clustering (SC), and state-of-the-art bespoke methods over benchmark datasets. TableDC consistently outperforms existing DC, SC, and bespoke methods.