Benchmarking Tabular Representation Models in Transfer Learning Settings

Deep learning has revolutionized the transfer of knowledge between similar tasks in data modalities such as images, text, and graphs. However, the same level of success has not been attained in for tabular data. This disparity can be attributed to the inherent absence of structural characteristics, such as spatial and temporal correlations, within common tabular datasets. Moreover, classic methods such as logistic regression and decision trees have been shown to perform competitively with deep learning methods. In this work, we benchmark the classic and deep learning methods specifically within the setting of transfer learning. We offer new benchmarking results for the EHR phenotyping task in the MetaMIMIC dataset and propose a new transfer learning setting of transferring mortality prediction from common to rare cancers with The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).