arXiv AI By Arun Vignesh Malarkkan, Wangyang Ying, Yanjie Fu

CAFE: Causally-Guided Automated Feature Engineering with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

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CAFE is a new framework for automated feature engineering that treats the task as a causally‑guided sequential decision process. It first learns a sparse directed acyclic graph to identify causal relationships among features and the target, then uses a multi‑agent deep Q‑learning system to select causal groups and transformation operators while managing feature complexity. On 15 public benchmarks, CAFE outperforms leading AFE baselines, converges faster, and shows markedly lower performance drops under distribution shifts.

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