Model-Aware Representation Learning for Categorical Data with Hierarchical Couplings

Learning an appropriate representation for categorical data is a critical yet challenging task. Current research makes efforts to embed the categorical data into the vector or dis/similarity spaces, however, it either ignores the complex interactions within data or overlooks the relationship between the representation and its fed learning model. In this paper, we propose a model-aware representation learning framework for categorical data with hierarchical couplings, which simultaneously reveals the couplings from value to object and optimizes the fitness of the represented data for the follow-up learning model. An SVM-aware representation learning method has been instantiated for this framework. Extensive experiments on ten UCI categorical datasets with diverse characteristics demonstrate the representation via our proposed method can significantly improve the learning performance (up to 18.64% improved) compared with other three competitors.