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Related papers: Guidelines for Producing Useful Synthetic Data

200 papers

Synthetic datasets are important for evaluating and testing machine learning models. When evaluating real-life recommender systems, high-dimensional categorical (and sparse) datasets are often considered. Unfortunately, there are not many…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Miha Malenšek , Blaž Škrlj , Blaž Mramor , Jure Demšar

We propose a method to generate statistically representative synthetic data from a given dataset. The main goal of our method is for the created data set to mimic the inter--feature correlations present in the original data, while also…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Nicklas Jävergård , Rainey Lyons , Adrian Muntean , Jonas Forsman

Recent advances in generative models facilitate the creation of synthetic data to be made available for research in privacy-sensitive contexts. However, the analysis of synthetic data raises a unique set of methodological challenges. In…

Recent advances in generating synthetic data that allow to add principled ways of protecting privacy -- such as Differential Privacy -- are a crucial step in sharing statistical information in a privacy preserving way. But while the focus…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-04 Christian Arnold , Marcel Neunhoeffer

Synthetic images generated from deep generative models have the potential to address data scarcity and data privacy issues. The selection of synthesis models is mostly based on image quality measurements, and most researchers favor…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Xiaodan Xing , Federico Felder , Yang Nan , Giorgos Papanastasiou , Walsh Simon , Guang Yang

Synthetic tabular data generation becomes crucial when real data is limited, expensive to collect, or simply cannot be used due to privacy concerns. However, producing good quality synthetic data is challenging. Several probabilistic,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Vikram S Chundawat , Ayush K Tarun , Murari Mandal , Mukund Lahoti , Pratik Narang

Datasets of different characteristics are needed by the research community for experimental purposes. However, real data may be difficult to obtain due to privacy concerns. Moreover, real data may not meet specific characteristics which are…

Databases · Computer Science 2013-11-15 Vanessa Ayala-Rivera , Patrick McDonagh , Thomas Cerqueus , Liam Murphy

Recent advances in generative modelling have led many to see synthetic data as the go-to solution for a range of problems around data access, scarcity, and under-representation. In this paper, we study three prominent use cases: (1) Sharing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Bogdan Kulynych , Theresa Stadler , Jean Louis Raisaro , Carmela Troncoso

This paper explains how the synthpop package for R has been extended to include functions to calculate measures of identity and attribute disclosure risk for synthetic data that measure risks for the records used to create the synthetic…

Applications · Statistics 2026-03-02 Gillian M Raab , Beata Nowok , Chris Dibben

As more tech companies engage in rigorous economic analyses, we are confronted with a data problem: in-house papers cannot be replicated due to use of sensitive, proprietary, or private data. Readers are left to assume that the obscured…

General Economics · Economics 2020-11-10 Allison Koenecke , Hal Varian

Synthetic data generation is a powerful tool for privacy protection when considering public release of record-level data files. Initially proposed about three decades ago, it has generated significant research and application interest. To…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-03 Jingchen Hu , Claire McKay Bowen

Feature selection is an important and active field of research in machine learning and data science. Our goal in this paper is to propose a collection of synthetic datasets that can be used as a common reference point for feature selection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Firuz Kamalov , Hana Sulieman , Aswani Kumar Cherukuri

Recent advances in deep generative models have greatly expanded the potential to create realistic synthetic health datasets. These synthetic datasets aim to preserve the characteristics, patterns, and overall scientific conclusions derived…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Jennifer A Bartell , Sander Boisen Valentin , Anders Krogh , Henning Langberg , Martin Bøgsted

Data for good implies unfettered access to data. But data owners must be conservative about how, when, and why they share data or risk violating the trust of the people they aim to help, losing their funding, or breaking the law. Data…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2017-10-25 Bill Howe , Julia Stoyanovich , Haoyue Ping , Bernease Herman , Matt Gee

Big data analysis poses the dual problem of privacy preservation and utility, i.e., how accurate data analyses remain after transforming original data in order to protect the privacy of the individuals that the data is about - and whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Md Sakib Nizam Khan , Niklas Reje , Sonja Buchegger

This work presents a systematic benchmark of differentially private synthetic data generation algorithms that can generate tabular data. Utility of the synthetic data is evaluated by measuring whether the synthetic data preserve the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-02-16 Yuchao Tao , Ryan McKenna , Michael Hay , Ashwin Machanavajjhala , Gerome Miklau

Accurate neutron cross section data are a vital input to the simulation of nuclear systems for a wide range of applications from energy production to national security. The evaluation of experimental data is a key step in producing accurate…

Computational Physics · Physics 2023-12-12 Noah Walton , Jesse Brown , William Fritsch , Dave Brown , Gustavo Nobre , Vladimir Sobes

Privacy poses a significant obstacle to the progress of learning analytics (LA), presenting challenges like inadequate anonymization and data misuse that current solutions struggle to address. Synthetic data emerges as a potential remedy,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Qinyi Liu , Mohammad Khalil , Ronas Shakya , Jelena Jovanovic

Several official statistics agencies release synthetic data as public use microdata files. In practice, synthetic data do not admit accurate results for every analysis. Thus, it is beneficial for agencies to provide users with feedback on…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Tong Lin , Jerome P. Reiter

Existing private synthetic data generation algorithms are agnostic to downstream tasks. However, end users may have specific requirements that the synthetic data must satisfy. Failure to meet these requirements could significantly reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Hao Wang , Shivchander Sudalairaj , John Henning , Kristjan Greenewald , Akash Srivastava