How to Apply Self-Supervision to Tabular Data: Introducing dfencoder

Unsupervised learning is an old and well-understood problem in machine learning; LeCun's choice to replace it as the star in his cake analogy is not something he should take lightly! If you dive into the definition of self-supervised learning, you'll begin to see that it's really just an approach to unsupervised learning. Since many of the breakthroughs in machine learning this decade have been based on supervised learning techniques, successes in unsupervised problems tend to emerge when researchers re-frame an unsupervised problem as a supervised problem. Specifically, in self-supervised learning, we find a clever way to generate labels without human annotators. An easy example is a technique called next-step prediction.