Multi-Channel Graph Fusion Representation for Tabular Data Imputation

The unprecedented success of deep learning has revolutionized the imputation mechanism of missing values in tabular data, typically caused by data corruption and sensor noise. One promising approach involves mining the latent relationship among all entities of tabular data to complete the missing values from similar entities. However, the various data absence challenges an effective identification of similar entities with missing attributes. Moreover, this limited entity-level relationship fails to capture the intricate interdependencies that typically arise between different attributes, leading to potential bias in data imputation. In this paper, we propose to build an innovative customized graph for tabular data, termed MCG4Table, that allows us to facilitate the representation of intra-entity, intra-attribute, and entity-attribute relationships. At the heart of our approach is a novel strategy to establish a multi-channel graph by dividing diverse relationships concealed within the tabular data from different perspectives. Moreover, MCG4Table introduces a two-stage channel feature fusion architecture, namely a homogeneous-then-heterogeneous fusion strategy, yielding enhanced representations of entities and attributes for the downstream imputation task. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method. Elaborate ablation studies and parameter sensitivity analysis verify the effectiveness and robustness of our dedicated strategies. Our code will be made publicly available.