Evaluating Inter-Column Logical Relationships in Synthetic Tabular Data Generation

Yunbo Long, Liming Xu, Alexandra Brintrup

Abstract: Current evaluations of synthetic tabular data mainly focus on how well joint distributions are modeled, often overlooking the assessment of their effectiveness in preserving realistic event sequences and coherent entity relationships across columns.This paper proposes three evaluation metrics designed to assess the preservation of logical relationships among columns in synthetic tabular data. We validate these metrics by assessing the performance of both classical and state-of-the-art generation methods on a real-world industrial dataset.Experimental results reveal that existing methods often fail to rigorously maintain logical consistency (e.g., hierarchical relationships in geography or organization) and dependencies (e.g., temporal sequences or mathematical relationships), which are crucial for preserving the fine-grained realism of real-world tabular data. Building on these insights, this study also discusses possible pathways to better capture logical relationships while modeling the distribution of synthetic tabular data.