distinct class-specific energy-based model
TabEBM: A Tabular Data Augmentation Method with Distinct Class-Specific Energy-Based Models
Data collection is often difficult in critical fields such as medicine, physics, and chemistry, yielding typically only small tabular datasets. However, classification methods tend to struggle with these small datasets, leading to poor predictive performance. Increasing the training set with additional synthetic data, similar to data augmentation in images, is commonly believed to improve downstream tabular classification performance. However, current tabular generative methods that learn either the joint distribution p(\mathbf{x}, y) or the class-conditional distribution p(\mathbf{x} \mid y) often overfit on small datasets, resulting in poor-quality synthetic data, usually worsening classification performance compared to using real data alone. To solve these challenges, we introduce TabEBM, a novel class-conditional generative method using Energy-Based Models (EBMs).