Tabular data synthesis is an emerging approach to circumvent strict regulations on data privacy while discovering knowledge through big data. Although state-of-the-art AI-based tabular data synthesizers, e.g., table-GAN, CTGAN, TVAE, and CTAB-GAN, are effective at generating synthetic tabular data, their training is sensitive to column permutations of input data. In this paper, we first conduct an extensive empirical study to disclose such a property of permutation invariance and an in-depth analysis of the existing synthesizers. We show that changing the input column order worsens the statistical difference between real and synthetic data by up to 38.67% due to the encoding of tabular data and the network architectures. To fully unleash the potential of big synthetic tabular data, we propose two solutions: (i) AE-GAN, a synthesizer that uses an autoencoder network to represent the tabular data and GAN networks to synthesize the latent representation, and (ii) a feature sorting algorithm to find the suitable column order of input data for CNN-based synthesizers. We evaluate the proposed solutions on five datasets in terms of the sensitivity to the column permutation, the quality of synthetic data, and the utility in downstream analyses. Our results show that we enhance the property of permutation-invariance when training synthesizers and further improve the quality and utility of synthetic data, up to 22%, compared to the existing synthesizers.
Tabular data synthesis has received wide attention in the literature. This is because available data is often limited, incomplete, or cannot be obtained easily, and data privacy is becoming increasingly important. In this work, we present a generalized GAN framework for tabular synthesis, which combines the adversarial training of GANs and the negative log-density regularization of invertible neural networks. The proposed framework can be used for two distinctive objectives. First, we can further improve the synthesis quality, by decreasing the negative log-density of real records in the proce…
While data sharing is crucial for knowledge development, privacy concerns and strict regulation (e.g., European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)) limit its full effectiveness. Synthetic tabular data emerges as alternative to enable data sharing while fulfilling regulatory and privacy constraints. State-of-the-art tabular data synthesizers draw methodologies from Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). As GANs improve the synthesized data increasingly resemble the real data risking to leak privacy. Differential privacy (DP) provides theoretical guarantees on privacy loss but degrades da…
Bayesian Generative Adversarial Networks via Gaussian Approximation for Tabular Data Synthesis
Department of Social Statistics, The University of Manchester（社会统计系，曼彻斯特大学）；Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特商业联盟学院，曼彻斯特大学）
QTabGAN: A Hybrid Quantum-Classical GAN for Tabular Data Synthesis
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, India（计算机科学与工程系，印度理工学院（BHU），瓦拉纳西，印度）；Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom（应用数学与理论物理系，剑桥大学，剑桥，英国）
Synthetic tabular data emerges as an alternative for sharing knowledge while adhering to restrictive data access regulations, e.g., European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Mainstream state-of-the-art tabular data synthesizers draw methodologies from Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which are composed of a generator and a discriminator. While convolution neural networks are shown to be a better architecture than fully connected networks for tabular data synthesizing, two key properties of tabular data are overlooked: (i) the global correlation across columns, and (ii) invaria…
Agent-based transportation modelling has become the standard to simulate travel behaviour, mobility choices and activity preferences using disaggregate travel demand data for entire populations, data that are not typically readily available. Various methods have been proposed to synthesize population data for this purpose. We present a Composite Travel Generative Adversarial Network (CTGAN), a novel deep generative model to estimate the underlying joint distribution of a population, that is capable of reconstructing composite synthetic agents having tabular (e.g. age and sex) as well as sequen…
Synthesizing tabular data is attracting much attention these days for various purposes. With sophisticate synthetic data, for instance, one can augment its training data. For the past couple of years, tabular data synthesis techniques have been greatly improved. Recent work made progress to address many problems in synthesizing tabular data, such as the imbalanced distribution and multimodality problems. However, the data utility of state-of-the-art methods is not satisfactory yet. In this work, we significantly improve the utility by designing our generator and discriminator based on neural o…
TabularQGAN: A quantum generative model for tabular data synthesis
SAP SE（SAP公司）；BASF Digital Solutions（巴斯夫数字解决方案）；QUTAC Quantum Technology and Application Consortium（QUTAC量子技术与应用联盟）；Technical University of Munich CIT（慕尼黑技术大学CIT）；Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München（慕尼黑路德维希-马克西米利安大学）；Merck KGaA（默克公司）
Department of Social Statistics（社会统计系）；The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Alliance Manchester Business School（曼彻斯特商业联盟学院）；Amsterdam Machine Learning Lab（阿姆斯特丹机器学习实验室）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
Multimodal synthesis of MRI and tabular data with diffusion in a joint latent space via cross-attention
Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS（弗劳恩霍夫数字医学研究所MEVIS）；Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS（莱比锡预防研究与流行病学研究所 – BIPS）；Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bremen（不莱梅大学数学与计算机科学学院）；Faculty of Physics and Electrical Engineering, University of Bremen（不莱梅大学物理与电气工程学院）
Diff-DDoS: Realistic Cyber-Physical Attack Synthesis and Robust Detection for 5G-Enabled CPS Using Tabular Diffusion Models
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong（香港恒生大学）；Hong Kong Shue Yan University（香港树仁大学）
École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS), Université du Québec（魁北克大学高等技术学院）；Fédération des Caisses Desjardins du Québec（魁北克德信联合会）；University of Windsor（温莎大学）
This paper introduces a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) for synthesizing large-scale tabular databases which contain various features such as continuous, discrete, and binary. Technically, our GAN belongs to the category of class-conditioned generative models with a predefined conditional vector. However, we propose a new formulation for deriving such a vector incorporating both binary and discrete features simultaneously. We refer to this noble definition as compound conditional vector and employ it for training the generator network. The core architecture of this network is a thre…
Deep generative models have become useful for synthetic data generation, particularly population synthesis. The models implicitly learn the probability distribution of a dataset and can draw samples from a distribution. Several models have been proposed, but their performance is only tested on a single cross-sectional sample. The implementation of population synthesis on single datasets is seen as a drawback that needs further studies to explore the robustness of the models on multiple datasets. While comparing with the real data can increase trust and interpretability of the models, technique…
TU Delft（代尔夫特理工大学）；ABB Research Switzerland（ABB瑞士研究院）
Tabular generative adversarial networks (TGAN) have recently emerged to cater to the need of synthesizing tabular data -- the most widely used data format. While synthetic tabular data offers the advantage of complying with privacy regulations, there still exists a risk of privacy leakage via inference attacks due to interpolating the properties of real data during training. Differential private (DP) training algorithms provide theoretical guarantees for training machine learning models by injecting statistical noise to prevent privacy leaks. However, the challenges of applying DP on TGAN are …
School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学社会科学学院）；Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学联盟曼彻斯特商学院）
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are gaining increasing attention as a means for synthesising data. So far much of this work has been applied to use cases outside of the data confidentiality domain with a common application being the production of artificial images. Here we consider the potential application of GANs for the purpose of generating synthetic census microdata. We employ a battery of utility metrics and a disclosure risk metric (the Targeted Correct Attribution Probability) to compare the data produced by tabular GANs with those produced using orthodox data synthesis methods.
Creation begins with understanding: LLMs as strategy designers for privacy-preserving tabular data synthesis
School of Artificial Intelligence, Jilin University（吉林大学人工智能学院）；Broad College of Business, Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学broad商学院）；Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)（英联邦科学与工业研究组织）；Center of Excellence for Generative AI, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学生成式人工智能卓越中心）；The Swiss AI Lab, IDSIA-USI/SUPSI（瑞士人工智能实验室IDSIA-USI/SUPSI）
Real-world binary classification tasks are in many cases imbalanced, where the minority class is much smaller than the majority class. This skewness is challenging for machine learning algorithms as they tend to focus on the majority and greatly misclassify the minority. Adding synthetic minority samples to the dataset before training the model is a popular technique to address this difficulty and is commonly achieved by interpolating minority samples. Tabular datasets are often multi-modal and contain discrete (categorical) features in addition to continuous ones which makes interpolation of …
