# Tabular Deep Learning vs Classical Machine Learning for Urban Land Cover Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19010 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19010/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Deep Learning Models for Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11959/) (2021)
- [TabNet: Attentive Interpretable Tabular Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07442/) (2019)
- [TabTransformer: Tabular Data Modeling Using Contextual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06678/) (2020)
- [TabSeq: A Framework for Deep Learning on Tabular Data via Sequential Ordering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13203/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Urban Land Cover (ULC) classification plays a crucial role in urban planning, environmental monitoring, and sustainable development. We study this task using the ULC dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository, which includes tabular features derived from high-resolution aerial imagery across nine classes (e.g., roads, trees, grass, water). The dataset presents typical remote sensing challenges, including high dimensionality, heterogeneous features, and class imbalance. In a unified, reproducible pipeline, we benchmark classical machine learning models (e.g., Logistic Regression, SVM, Random Forest, XGBoost, CatBoost) against Tabular Deep Learning (TDL) models (TabNet, FT-Transformer, TabTransformer, TabSeq, and 1D CNNs). To address class imbalance, we employ weighted cross-entropy loss for TDL models and evaluate performance using accuracy, macro-precision, macro-recall, macro-F1, AUC-ROC, and confusion matrices. Our results show that while tree ensembles remain strong general baselines, TDL models can match or exceed their performance when non-linear interactions are significant and imbalance handling is effective, providing complementary advantages for urban land cover mapping. See code: https://github.com/mtesha/tdl-vs-ml-urbanlandcover