Assessing Generative Models for Structured Data

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Cannon, Reilly, Laird, Nicolette M., Vazquez, Caesar, Lin, Andy, Wagler, Amy, Chiang, Tony
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866916663440441344
author Cannon, Reilly
Laird, Nicolette M.
Vazquez, Caesar
Lin, Andy
Wagler, Amy
Chiang, Tony
author_facet Cannon, Reilly
Laird, Nicolette M.
Vazquez, Caesar
Lin, Andy
Wagler, Amy
Chiang, Tony
contents Synthetic tabular data generation has emerged as a promising method to address limited data availability and privacy concerns. With the sharp increase in the performance of large language models in recent years, researchers have been interested in applying these models to the generation of tabular data. However, little is known about the quality of the generated tabular data from large language models. The predominant method for assessing the quality of synthetic tabular data is the train-synthetic-test-real approach, where the artificial examples are compared to the original by how well machine learning models, trained separately on the real and synthetic sets, perform in some downstream tasks. This method does not directly measure how closely the distribution of generated data approximates that of the original. This paper introduces rigorous methods for directly assessing synthetic tabular data against real data by looking at inter-column dependencies within the data. We find that large language models (GPT-2), both when queried via few-shot prompting and when fine-tuned, and GAN (CTGAN) models do not produce data with dependencies that mirror the original real data. Results from this study can inform future practice in synthetic data generation to improve data quality.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_20903
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Assessing Generative Models for Structured Data
Cannon, Reilly
Laird, Nicolette M.
Vazquez, Caesar
Lin, Andy
Wagler, Amy
Chiang, Tony
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Synthetic tabular data generation has emerged as a promising method to address limited data availability and privacy concerns. With the sharp increase in the performance of large language models in recent years, researchers have been interested in applying these models to the generation of tabular data. However, little is known about the quality of the generated tabular data from large language models. The predominant method for assessing the quality of synthetic tabular data is the train-synthetic-test-real approach, where the artificial examples are compared to the original by how well machine learning models, trained separately on the real and synthetic sets, perform in some downstream tasks. This method does not directly measure how closely the distribution of generated data approximates that of the original. This paper introduces rigorous methods for directly assessing synthetic tabular data against real data by looking at inter-column dependencies within the data. We find that large language models (GPT-2), both when queried via few-shot prompting and when fine-tuned, and GAN (CTGAN) models do not produce data with dependencies that mirror the original real data. Results from this study can inform future practice in synthetic data generation to improve data quality.
title Assessing Generative Models for Structured Data
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20903