TabSODA: Tabular Diffusion based Imputation with Skip Pattern Detection and Ordinal Awareness
About
Missing data imputation in large-scale surveys faces two challenges that are not well handled by current tabular diffusion methods. First, \emph{structural skips}, cells made inapplicable by questionnaire design, should not be imputed but are often conflated with item nonresponse. Second, \emph{ordinal} responses encode ordered categories, yet most pipelines treat them as nominal levels through one-hot or analog-bit encodings. We introduce \textbf{TabSODA} (\textbf{Tab}ular diffusion with \textbf{S}kip pattern detection and \textbf{O}r\textbf{d}inal \textbf{A}wareness), an Expectation-Maximization (EM)-based diffusion imputer built on the Elucidated Diffusion Model (EDM) framework. TabSODA propagates structural skips through the denoising loss and reverse-time sampler, and represents ordinal variables with cumulative-probit scalar latents while retaining analog-bit encodings for nominal variables. When a codebook skip mask is available, TabSODA uses it directly; otherwise, the TabSODA+SKIP variant estimates the mask from raw responses and questionnaire order using a CART-based skip-pattern miner. On Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) study and the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), two nationally representative U.S.\ surveys, TabSODA reduces ordinal MACE by up to $23.7\%$ and improves categorical accuracy by up to $9\%$ over the strongest baseline across MCAR, MAR, and MNAR masking. The skip miner achieves near-perfect precision on both datasets, allowing TabSODA+SKIP to closely track the codebook-mask variant.