# How to RETIRE Tabular Data in Favor of Discrete Digital Signal Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19733 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19733/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (2019)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [TabNet: Attentive Interpretable Tabular Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07442/) (2019)
- [Tabular Data: Deep Learning is Not All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03253/) (2021)
- [Deep Neural Networks and Tabular Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01889/) (2021)
- [Characterizing and Avoiding Negative Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09751/) (2018)
- [Well-tuned Simple Nets Excel on Tabular Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11189/) (2021)
- [Trust Issues: Uncertainty Estimation Does Not Enable Reliable OOD Detection On Medical Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03274/) (2020)
- [Network On Network for Tabular Data Classification in Real-world Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10114/) (2020)
- [Employing Two-Dimensional Word Embedding for Difficult Tabular Data Stream Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15836/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The successes achieved by deep neural networks in computer vision tasks have led in recent years to the emergence of a new research area dubbed Multi-Dimensional Encoding (MDE). Methods belonging to this family aim to transform tabular data into a homogeneous form of discrete digital signals (images) to apply convolutional networks to initially unsuitable problems. Despite the successive emerging works, the pool of multi-dimensional encoding methods is still low, and the scope of research on existing modality encoding techniques is quite limited. To contribute to this area of research, we propose the Radar-based Encoding from Tabular to Image REpresentation (RETIRE), which allows tabular data to be represented as radar graphs, capturing the feature characteristics of each problem instance. RETIRE was compared with a pool of state-of-the-art MDE algorithms as well as with XGBoost in terms of classification accuracy and computational complexity. In addition, an analysis was carried out regarding transferability and explainability to provide more insight into both RETIRE and existing MDE techniques. The results obtained, supported by statistical analysis, confirm the superiority of RETIRE over other established MDE methods.