Bt-GAN: Generating Fair Synthetic Healthdata via Bias-transforming Generative Adversarial Networks

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Main Authors: Ramachandranpillai, Resmi, Sikder, Md Fahim, Bergström, David, Heintz, Fredrik
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Ramachandranpillai, Resmi
Sikder, Md Fahim
Bergström, David
Heintz, Fredrik
author_facet Ramachandranpillai, Resmi
Sikder, Md Fahim
Bergström, David
Heintz, Fredrik
contents Synthetic data generation offers a promising solution to enhance the usefulness of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) by generating realistic de-identified data. However, the existing literature primarily focuses on the quality of synthetic health data, neglecting the crucial aspect of fairness in downstream predictions. Consequently, models trained on synthetic EHR have faced criticism for producing biased outcomes in target tasks. These biases can arise from either spurious correlations between features or the failure of models to accurately represent sub-groups. To address these concerns, we present Bias-transforming Generative Adversarial Networks (Bt-GAN), a GAN-based synthetic data generator specifically designed for the healthcare domain. In order to tackle spurious correlations (i), we propose an information-constrained Data Generation Process that enables the generator to learn a fair deterministic transformation based on a well-defined notion of algorithmic fairness. To overcome the challenge of capturing exact sub-group representations (ii), we incentivize the generator to preserve sub-group densities through score-based weighted sampling. This approach compels the generator to learn from underrepresented regions of the data manifold. We conduct extensive experiments using the MIMIC-III database. Our results demonstrate that Bt-GAN achieves SOTA accuracy while significantly improving fairness and minimizing bias amplification. We also perform an in-depth explainability analysis to provide additional evidence supporting the validity of our study. In conclusion, our research introduces a novel and professional approach to addressing the limitations of synthetic data generation in the healthcare domain. By incorporating fairness considerations and leveraging advanced techniques such as GANs, we pave the way for more reliable and unbiased predictions in healthcare applications.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_13634
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bt-GAN: Generating Fair Synthetic Healthdata via Bias-transforming Generative Adversarial Networks
Ramachandranpillai, Resmi
Sikder, Md Fahim
Bergström, David
Heintz, Fredrik
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Synthetic data generation offers a promising solution to enhance the usefulness of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) by generating realistic de-identified data. However, the existing literature primarily focuses on the quality of synthetic health data, neglecting the crucial aspect of fairness in downstream predictions. Consequently, models trained on synthetic EHR have faced criticism for producing biased outcomes in target tasks. These biases can arise from either spurious correlations between features or the failure of models to accurately represent sub-groups. To address these concerns, we present Bias-transforming Generative Adversarial Networks (Bt-GAN), a GAN-based synthetic data generator specifically designed for the healthcare domain. In order to tackle spurious correlations (i), we propose an information-constrained Data Generation Process that enables the generator to learn a fair deterministic transformation based on a well-defined notion of algorithmic fairness. To overcome the challenge of capturing exact sub-group representations (ii), we incentivize the generator to preserve sub-group densities through score-based weighted sampling. This approach compels the generator to learn from underrepresented regions of the data manifold. We conduct extensive experiments using the MIMIC-III database. Our results demonstrate that Bt-GAN achieves SOTA accuracy while significantly improving fairness and minimizing bias amplification. We also perform an in-depth explainability analysis to provide additional evidence supporting the validity of our study. In conclusion, our research introduces a novel and professional approach to addressing the limitations of synthetic data generation in the healthcare domain. By incorporating fairness considerations and leveraging advanced techniques such as GANs, we pave the way for more reliable and unbiased predictions in healthcare applications.
title Bt-GAN: Generating Fair Synthetic Healthdata via Bias-transforming Generative Adversarial Networks
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.13634