Systematic Assessment of Tabular Data Synthesis

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission2222 Authors

Keywords: Tabular Data Synthesis, Privacy, Evaluation Metric, Generative Models

TL;DR: Proposed a set of new evaluation metrics and framework for tabular data synthesis from fidelity, privacy and utility

Abstract: Data synthesis has been advocated as an important approach for utilizing data while protecting data privacy. In recent years, a plethora of tabular data synthesis algorithms (i.e., synthesizers) have been proposed. A comprehensive understanding of these synthesizers' strengths and weaknesses remains elusive due to the absence of principled evaluation metrics and head-to-head comparisons between state-of-the-art deep generative approaches and statistical methods. In this paper, we examine and critique existing evaluation metrics, and introduce a set of new metrics in terms of fidelity, privacy, and utility to address their limitations. Based on the proposed metrics, we also devise a unified objective for tuning, which can consistently improve the quality of synthetic data for all methods. We conducted extensive evaluations of 8 different types of synthesizers on 12 real-world datasets and identified some interesting findings, which offer new directions for privacy-preserving data synthesis.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

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Submission Number: 2222