The semantic annotation of tabular data plays a crucial role in various downstream tasks. Previous research has proposed knowledge graph (KG)-based and deep learning-based methods, each with its inherent limitations. KG-based methods encounter difficulties annotating columns when there is no match for column cells in the KG. Moreover, KG-based methods can provide multiple predictions for one column, making it challenging to determine the semantic type with the most suitable granularity for the dataset. This type granularity issue limits their scalability. On the other hand, deep learning-based methods face challenges related to the valuable context missing issue. This occurs when the information within the table is insufficient for determining the correct column type. This paper presents KGLink, a method that combines WikiData KG information with a pre-trained deep learning language model for table column annotation, effectively addressing both type granularity and valuable context missing issues. Through comprehensive experiments on widely used tabular datasets encompassing numeric and string columns with varying type granularity, we showcase the effectiveness and efficiency of KGLink. By leveraging the strengths of KGLink, we successfully surmount challenges related to type granularity and valuable context issues, establishing it as a robust solution for the semantic annotation of tabular data.

In an era of rapidly advancing data-driven applications, there is a growing demand for data in both research and practice. Synthetic data have emerged as an alternative when no real data is available (e.g., due to privacy regulations). Synthesizing tabular data presents unique and complex challenges, especially handling (i) missing values, (ii) dataset imbalance, (iii) diverse column types, and (iv) complex data distributions, as well as preserving (i) column correlations, (ii) temporal dependencies, and (iii) integrity constraints (e.g., functional dependencies) present in the original dataset. While substantial progress has been made recently in the context of generational models, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for tabular data today, and choosing the right tool for a given task is therefore no trivial task. In this paper, we survey the state of the art in Tabular Data Synthesis (TDS), examine the needs of users by defining a set of functional and non-functional requirements, and compile the challenges associated with meeting those needs. In addition, we evaluate the reported performance of 36 popular research TDS tools about these requirements and develop a decision guide to help users find suitable TDS tools for their applications. The resulting decision guide also identifies significant research gaps.

Data standardization is a crucial part in data science life cycle. While tools like Pandas offer robust functionalities, their complexity and the manual effort required for customizing code to diverse column types pose significant challenges. Although large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have shown promise in automating this process through natural language understanding and code generation, it still demands expert-level programming knowledge and continuous interaction for prompt refinement. To solve these challenges, our key idea is to propose a Python library with declarative, unified APIs for standardizing column types, simplifying the code generation of LLM with concise API calls. We first propose Dataprep.Clean which is written as a component of the Dataprep Library, offers a significant reduction in complexity by enabling the standardization of specific column types with a single line of code. Then we introduce the CleanAgent framework integrating Dataprep.Clean and LLM-based agents to automate the data standardization process. With CleanAgent, data scientists need only provide their requirements once, allowing for a hands-free, automatic standardization process.

Well, I had to do some quick ML work and wanted to try out something fairly new. I've seen PyCaret going around so I had to give it a try. PyCaret is a low-code open-source machine learning library for Python. It basically wraps a bunch of other libraries such as sklearn and xgboost and makes it super easy to try a lot of different models, blend them, stack them and stir the pot until something good comes out. It requires very little code to get from 0 to hero.

Tables in scientific papers contain a wealth of valuable knowledge for the scientific enterprise. To help the many of us who frequently consult this type of knowledge, we present Tab2Know, a new end-to-end system to build a Knowledge Base (KB) from tables in scientific papers. Tab2Know addresses the challenge of automatically interpreting the tables in papers and of disambiguating the entities that they contain. To solve these problems, we propose a pipeline that employs both statistical-based classifiers and logic-based reasoning. First, our pipeline applies weakly supervised classifiers to recognize the type of tables and columns, with the help of a data labeling system and an ontology specifically designed for our purpose. Then, logic-based reasoning is used to link equivalent entities (via sameAs links) in different tables. An empirical evaluation of our approach using a corpus of papers in the Computer Science domain has returned satisfactory performance. This suggests that ours is a promising step to create a large-scale KB of scientific knowledge.

AWS pushes Sagemaker as its machine learning platform. However, Spark's MLlib is a comprehensive library that runs distributed ML natively on AWS Glue -- and provides a viable alternative to their primary ML platform. One of the big benefits of Sagemaker is that it easily supports experimentation via its Jupyter Notebooks. But operationalising your Sagemaker ML can be difficult, particularly if you need to include ETL processing at the start of your pipeline. In this situation, Apache Spark's MLlib running on AWS Glue can be a good option -- by its very nature, it is immediately operationalised, integrated with ETL pre-processing and ready to be used in production for an end-to-end machine learning pipeline.

The data type, missing data and, anomalies can be defined in broad terms as follows: The data type is the common characteristic that is expected to be shared by entries in a column, such as integers, strings, IP addresses, dates, etc., while missing data denotes an absence of a data value which can be encoded in various ways, and anomalies refer to values whose types differ from the given column type or the missing type. In order to model above types, we have developed PFSMs that can generate values from the corresponding domains. This, in turn, allows us to calculate the probability of a given data value being generated by a particular PFSM. We then combine these PFSMs in our model such that a data column x can be annotated via probabilistic inference in the proposed model, i.e., given a column of data, we can infer column type, and rows with missing and anomalous values.