Real-world tabular databases routinely combine continuous measurements and categorical records, yet missing entries are pervasive and can distort downstream analysis. We propose Statistical-Neural Interaction (SNI), an interpretable mixed-type imputation framework that couples correlation-derived statistical priors with neural feature attention through a Controllable-Prior Feature Attention (CPFA) module. CPFA learns head-wise prior-strength coefficients $\{λ_h\}$ that softly regularize attention toward the prior while allowing data-driven deviations when nonlinear patterns appear to be present in the data. Beyond imputation, SNI aggregates attention maps into a directed feature-dependency matrix that summarizes which variables the imputer relied on, without requiring post-hoc explainers. We evaluate SNI against six baselines (Mean/Mode, MICE, KNN, MissForest, GAIN, MIWAE) on six datasets spanning ICU monitoring, population surveys, socio-economic statistics, and engineering applications. Under MCAR/strict-MAR at 30\% missingness, SNI is generally competitive on continuous metrics but is often outperformed by accuracy-first baselines (MissForest, MIWAE) on categorical variables; in return, it provides intrinsic dependency diagnostics and explicit statistical-neural trade-off parameters. We additionally report MNAR stress tests (with a mask-aware variant) and discuss computational cost, limitations -- particularly for severely imbalanced categorical targets -- and deployment scenarios where interpretability may justify the trade-off.

Access to real-world healthcare data is limited by stringent privacy regulations and data imbalances, hindering advancements in research and clinical applications. Synthetic data presents a promising solution, yet existing methods often fail to ensure the realism, utility, and calibration essential for robust survival analysis. Here, we introduce Masked Clinical Modelling (MCM), an attention-based framework capable of generating high-fidelity synthetic datasets that preserve critical clinical insights, such as hazard ratios, while enhancing survival model calibration. Unlike traditional statistical methods like SMOTE and machine learning models such as VAEs, MCM supports both standalone dataset synthesis for reproducibility and conditional simulation for targeted augmentation, addressing diverse research needs. Validated on a chronic kidney disease electronic health records dataset, MCM reduced the general calibration loss over the entire dataset by 15%; and MCM reduced a mean calibration loss by 9% across 10 clinically stratified subgroups, outperforming 15 alternative methods.

Handling incomplete data in real-world applications is a critical challenge due to two key limitations of existing methods: (i) they are primarily designed for numeric data and struggle with categorical or heterogeneous/mixed datasets; (ii) they assume that data is missing completely at random, which is often not the case in practice -- in reality, data is missing in patterns, leading to biased results if these patterns are not accounted for. To address these two limitations, this paper presents a novel approach to handling missing values using the Probability Mass Similarity Kernel (PMK), a data-dependent kernel, which does not make any assumptions about data types and missing mechanisms. It eliminates the need for prior knowledge or extensive pre-processing steps and instead leverages the distribution of observed data. Our method unifies the representation of diverse data types by capturing more meaningful pairwise similarities and enhancing downstream performance. We evaluated our approach across over 10 datasets with numerical-only, categorical-only, and mixed features under different missing mechanisms and rates. Across both classification and clustering tasks, our approach consistently outperformed existing techniques, demonstrating its robustness and effectiveness in managing incomplete heterogeneous data.

In this paper, our goal is to generate synthetic data for heterogeneous (mixed-type) tabular datasets with high machine learning utility (MLu). Given that the MLu performance relies on accurately approximating the conditional distributions, we focus on devising a synthetic data generation method based on conditional distribution estimation. We propose a novel synthetic data generation method, MaCoDE, by redefining the multi-class classification task of Masked Language Modeling (MLM) as histogram-based non-parametric conditional density estimation. Our proposed method enables estimating conditional densities across arbitrary combinations of target and conditional variables. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our proposed method bridges the theoretical gap between distributional learning and MLM. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed model, we conduct synthetic data generation experiments on 10 real-world datasets. Given the analogy between predicting masked input tokens in MLM and missing data imputation, we also evaluate the performance of multiple imputations on incomplete datasets with various missing data mechanisms. Moreover, our proposed model offers the advantage of enabling adjustments to data privacy levels without requiring re-training.

In the wake of responsible AI, interpretability methods, which attempt to provide an explanation for the predictions of neural models have seen rapid progress. In this work, we are concerned with explanations that are applicable to natural language processing (NLP) models and tasks, and we focus specifically on the analysis of counterfactual, contrastive explanations. We note that while there have been several explainers proposed to produce counterfactual explanations, their behaviour can vary significantly and the lack of a universal ground truth for the counterfactual edits imposes an insuperable barrier on their evaluation. We propose a new back translation-inspired evaluation methodology that utilises earlier outputs of the explainer as ground truth proxies to investigate the consistency of explainers. We show that by iteratively feeding the counterfactual to the explainer we can obtain valuable insights into the behaviour of both the predictor and the explainer models, and infer patterns that would be otherwise obscured. Using this methodology, we conduct a thorough analysis and propose a novel metric to evaluate the consistency of counterfactual generation approaches with different characteristics across available performance indicators.

In real-world applications, we can encounter situations when a well-trained model has to be used to predict from a damaged dataset. The damage caused by missing or corrupted values can be either on the level of individual instances or on the level of entire features. Both situations have a negative impact on the usability of the model on such a dataset. This paper focuses on the scenario where entire features are missing which can be understood as a specific case of transfer learning. Our aim is to experimentally research the influence of various imputation methods on the performance of several classification models. The imputation impact is researched on a combination of traditional methods such as k-NN, linear regression, and MICE compared to modern imputation methods such as multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and gradient boosted trees (XGBT). For linear regression, MLP, and XGBT we also propose two approaches to using them for multiple features imputation. The experiments were performed on both real world and artificial datasets with continuous features where different numbers of features, varying from one feature to 50%, were missing. The results show that MICE and linear regression are generally good imputers regardless of the conditions. On the other hand, the performance of MLP and XGBT is strongly dataset dependent. Their performance is the best in some cases, but more often they perform worse than MICE or linear regression.