Cross-Domain Feature Expansion for Tabular Medical Data via Knowledge Graphs Injection

Abstract

Acquiring comprehensive cross-domain biomedical profiles is often costly and time-consuming, resulting in severe data scarcity in medical research. To address this challenge, we propose MedKGTab, a knowledge-injected framework specifically engineered for cross-domain feature expansion in tabular medical data. MedKGTab seeks to infer uncollected biomedical features from available ones by exploiting their inherent statistical dependencies and established medical correlations. By employing a row-column dual-attention mechanism, MedKGTab operates directly on raw structured tabular data, inherently capturing exact numerical distributions without the structural loss caused by tokenization. Crucially, MedKGTab integrates data-driven statistical priors with the SPOKE biomedical knowledge graph, achieving an optimal synergy between the data and knowledge channels. Within this synergy, the representations derived from the data channel are modulated by the injected biomedical knowledge, ensuring the final generated data are grounded in empirical medical research. Experimental results demonstrate that MedKGTab achieves high data fidelity and realistic data representation in cross-domain feature expansion. It outperforms both SOTA medical large models (e.g., Baichuan M3-plus) and specialized tabular models designed for medical data generation. Furthermore, MedKGTab consistently delivers superior performance across various data generation scenarios, whether inferring missing features within the same dataset or generalizing across different medical cohorts.