TabReformer: Unsupervised Representation Learning for Erroneous Data Detection

Error detection is a crucial preliminary phase in any data analytics pipeline. Existing error detection techniques typically target specific types of errors. Moreover, most of these detection models either require user-defined rules or ample hand-labeled training examples. Therefore, in this article, we present TabReformer, a model that learns bidirectional encoder representations for tabular data. The proposed model consists of two main phases. In the first phase, TabReformer follows encoder architecture with multiple self-attention layers to model the dependencies between cells and capture tuple-level representations. Also, the model utilizes a Gaussian Error Linear Unit activation function with the Masked Data Model objective to achieve deeper probabilistic understanding. In the second phase, the model parameters are fine-tuned for the task of erroneous data detection. The model applies a data augmentation module to generate more erroneous examples to represent the minority class. The experimental evaluation considers a wide range of databases with different types of errors and distributions. The empirical results show that our solution can enhance the recall values by 32.95% on average compared with state-of-the-art techniques while reducing the manual effort by up to 48.86%.