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Foundation Models for Tabular Data

The Definitive Guide to In-Context Learning, PFN Theory, and Production Deployment for Structured Data

Gradient-boosted trees have dominated tabular ML for a decade. A new class of pretrained models just broke through — making accurate predictions on unseen datasets in seconds, with zero gradient steps on your data. This book explains why it works, when it fails, and how to deploy it.

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About

About

About the Book

The first comprehensive reference on pretrained in-context learning models for structured data — from PFN theory to production deployment.

Gradient-boosted trees have dominated tabular ML for a decade. CatBoost, XGBoost, LightGBM. Every serious benchmark confirmed it.

That era is ending.

A new class of models — tabular foundation models — can make accurate predictions on previously unseen datasets without any dataset-specific training. No gradient descent on your data. No hyperparameter search. The training rows are the prompt.

This book is the definitive reference on the field. It covers the PFN framework and amortized Bayesian inference, seven architectural families (TabPFN-2.5, TabICLv2, Mitra, TabDPT, TabFlex, ConTextTab, TabSTAR), honest evaluation methodology that exposes benchmarking failures, deployment engineering including attention costs and KV caching, calibration, conformal prediction, and interpretability, and a practitioner decision framework for model selection.

Every claim is sourced. Every comparison is fair. Every architectural choice is explained from first principles.

If you're serious about production tabular ML, this is the book.

Author

About the Author

Valery Manokhin

Valery Manokhin, PhD, is an independent machine learning researcher, author, and educator specialising in conformal prediction, uncertainty quantification, and modern time series forecasting. He holds a PhD in Machine Learning from Royal Holloway, University of London, where he was supervised by Professor Vladimir Vovk — the creator of conformal prediction. He also holds an MBA from the University of Warwick, an MSc in Computational Statistics and Machine Learning from University College London, and a Certificate in Quantitative Finance (CQF).

His doctoral research produced the first multi-class Venn-Abers predictor (PKPD — Pairwise Kriging Probability Distribution), extending distribution-free calibration guarantees beyond binary classification. His 72-dataset empirical study remains one of the largest systematic evaluations of classifier calibration ever published.

Valery’s books have reached readers across 100+ countries. His titles include Mastering Modern Time Series ForecastingApplied Conformal PredictionMastering CatBoost, and the English translation of Kiselev’s classic Arithmetic — now available on Amazon KDP. He publishes through Gumroad, Amazon, and Leanpub.

He maintains the widely cited Awesome Conformal Prediction repository on GitHub and has built a technical community of 100K+ followers on LinkedIn and Twitter/X. His work has been read by practitioners and researchers at organisations including Amazon, Deloitte, Microsoft, EY, and JPMorgan.

He writes for people who already understand the fundamentals and demand rigour, mathematical precision, and production-grade thinking — not hype.

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