# AEFE: Automatic Embedded Feature Engineering for Categorical Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09770 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09770/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Wide & Deep Learning for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07792/) (2016)
- [DeepFM: A Factorization-Machine based Neural Network for CTR Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04247/) (2017)
- [Deep Interest Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06978/) (2017)
- [Deep & Cross Network for Ad Click Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05123/) (2017)
- [xDeepFM: Combining Explicit and Implicit Feature Interactions for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05170/) (2018)
- [Neural Factorization Machines for Sparse Predictive Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05027/) (2017)
- [Product-based Neural Networks for User Response Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00144/) (2016)
- [Attentional Factorization Machines: Learning the Weight of Feature Interactions via Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04617/) (2017)
- [Feature Engineering for Predictive Modeling using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07150/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning over Multi-field Categorical Data: A Case Study on User Response Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.02376/) (2016)
- [Automated Machine Learning: From Principles to Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.13306/) (2018)
- [Field-weighted Factorization Machines for Click-Through Rate Prediction in Display Advertising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03514/) (2018)
- [Fi-GNN: Modeling Feature Interactions via Graph Neural Networks for CTR Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05552/) (2019)
- [AutoFIS: Automatic Feature Interaction Selection in Factorization Models for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11235/) (2020)
- [Higher-Order Factorization Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.07195/) (2016)
- [Product-based Neural Networks for User Response Prediction over Multi-field Categorical Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00311/) (2018)
- [AutoCross: Automatic Feature Crossing for Tabular Data in Real-World Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12857/) (2019)
- [One button machine for automating feature engineering in relational databases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00327/) (2017)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Deep Neural Networks in CTR Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08541/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Automated Machine Learning for Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01390/) (2022)
- [How Usable is Automated Feature Engineering for Tabular Data?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13932/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The challenge of solving data mining problems in e-commerce applications such as recommendation system (RS) and click-through rate (CTR) prediction is how to make inferences by constructing combinatorial features from a large number of categorical features while preserving the interpretability of the method. In this paper, we propose Automatic Embedded Feature Engineering(AEFE), an automatic feature engineering framework for representing categorical features, which consists of various components including custom paradigm feature construction and multiple feature selection. By selecting the potential field pairs intelligently and generating a series of interpretable combinatorial features, our framework can provide a set of unseen generated features for enhancing model performance and then assist data analysts in discovering the feature importance for particular data mining tasks. Furthermore, AEFE is distributed implemented by task-parallelism, data sampling, and searching schema based on Matrix Factorization field combination, to optimize the performance and enhance the efficiency and scalability of the framework. Experiments conducted on some typical e-commerce datasets indicate that our method outperforms the classical machine learning models and state-of-the-art deep learning models.