Causal-Aware Generative Adversarial Networks with Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Nguyen, Tu Anh Hoang, Nguyen, Dang, Vo, Tri-Nhan, Le, Thuc Duy, Gupta, Sunil
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866912673833156608
author Nguyen, Tu Anh Hoang
Nguyen, Dang
Vo, Tri-Nhan
Le, Thuc Duy
Gupta, Sunil
author_facet Nguyen, Tu Anh Hoang
Nguyen, Dang
Vo, Tri-Nhan
Le, Thuc Duy
Gupta, Sunil
contents The utility of tabular data for tasks ranging from model training to large-scale data analysis is often constrained by privacy concerns or regulatory hurdles. While existing data generation methods, particularly those based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have shown promise, they frequently struggle with capturing complex causal relationship, maintaining data utility, and providing provable privacy guarantees suitable for enterprise deployment. We introduce CA-GAN, a novel generative framework specifically engineered to address these challenges for real-world tabular datasets. CA-GAN utilizes a two-step approach: causal graph extraction to learn a robust, comprehensive causal relationship in the data's manifold, followed by a custom Conditional WGAN-GP (Wasserstein GAN with Gradient Penalty) that operates exclusively as per the structure of nodes in the causal graph. More importantly, the generator is trained with a new Reinforcement Learning-based objective that aligns the causal graphs constructed from real and fake data, ensuring the causal awareness in both training and sampling phases. We demonstrate CA-GAN superiority over six SOTA methods across 14 tabular datasets. Our evaluations, focused on core data engineering metrics: causal preservation, utility preservation, and privacy preservation. Our method offers a practical, high-performance solution for data engineers seeking to create high-quality, privacy-compliant synthetic datasets to benchmark database systems, accelerate software development, and facilitate secure data-driven research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_24046
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causal-Aware Generative Adversarial Networks with Reinforcement Learning
Nguyen, Tu Anh Hoang
Nguyen, Dang
Vo, Tri-Nhan
Le, Thuc Duy
Gupta, Sunil
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The utility of tabular data for tasks ranging from model training to large-scale data analysis is often constrained by privacy concerns or regulatory hurdles. While existing data generation methods, particularly those based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have shown promise, they frequently struggle with capturing complex causal relationship, maintaining data utility, and providing provable privacy guarantees suitable for enterprise deployment. We introduce CA-GAN, a novel generative framework specifically engineered to address these challenges for real-world tabular datasets. CA-GAN utilizes a two-step approach: causal graph extraction to learn a robust, comprehensive causal relationship in the data's manifold, followed by a custom Conditional WGAN-GP (Wasserstein GAN with Gradient Penalty) that operates exclusively as per the structure of nodes in the causal graph. More importantly, the generator is trained with a new Reinforcement Learning-based objective that aligns the causal graphs constructed from real and fake data, ensuring the causal awareness in both training and sampling phases. We demonstrate CA-GAN superiority over six SOTA methods across 14 tabular datasets. Our evaluations, focused on core data engineering metrics: causal preservation, utility preservation, and privacy preservation. Our method offers a practical, high-performance solution for data engineers seeking to create high-quality, privacy-compliant synthetic datasets to benchmark database systems, accelerate software development, and facilitate secure data-driven research.
title Causal-Aware Generative Adversarial Networks with Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24046