Tabular Data: Is Attention All You Need?

Deep Learning has revolutionized the field of AI and led to remarkable achievements in applications involving image and text data. Unfortunately, there is inconclusive evidence on the merits of neural networks for structured tabular data. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale empirical study comparing neural networks against gradient-boosted decision trees on tabular data, but also transformer-based architectures against traditional multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) with residual connections. In contrast to prior work, our empirical findings indicate that neural networks are competitive against decision trees. Furthermore, we assess that transformer-based architectures do not outperform simpler variants of traditional MLP architectures on tabular datasets. As a result, this paper helps the research and practitioner communities make informed choices on deploying neural networks on future tabular data applications.