TIFG: Text-Informed Feature Generation with Large Language Models

Textual information of data is of vital importance for data mining and feature engineering. However, existing methods focus on learning the data structures and overlook the textual information along with the data. Consequently, they waste this valuable resource and miss out on the deeper data relationships embedded within the texts. In this paper, we introduce Text-Informed Feature Generation (TIFG), a novel LLM-based text-informed feature generation framework. TIFG utilizes the textual information to generate features by retrieving possible relevant features within external knowledge with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology. In this approach, the TIFG can generate new explainable features to enrich the feature space and further mine feature relationships. We design the TIFG to be an automated framework that continuously optimizes the feature generation process, adapts to new data inputs, and improves downstream task performance over iterations. A broad range of experiments in various downstream tasks showcases that our approach can generate high-quality and meaningful features, and is significantly superior to existing methods.