# Enabling Synthetic Data adoption in regulated domains

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.06297 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06297/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00414/) (2019)
- [Real-valued (Medical) Time Series Generation with Recurrent Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02633/) (2017)
- [CatBoost: gradient boosting with categorical features support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11363/) (2018)
- [How Faithful is your Synthetic Data? Sample-level Metrics for Evaluating and Auditing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08921/) (2021)
- [Privacy Risks of Securing Machine Learning Models against Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10291/) (2019)
- [Reconstruction and Membership Inference Attacks against Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03006/) (2019)
- [Generative Models and Model Criticism via Optimized Maximum Mean Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04488/) (2016)
- [Statistical stability indices for LIME: obtaining reliable explanations for Machine Learning models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11757/) (2020)
- [Measuring the quality of Synthetic data for use in competitions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.11345/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [On the Utility Recovery Incapability of Neural Net-based Differential Private Tabular Training Data Synthesizer under Privacy Deregulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15809/) (2022)
- [Downstream Task-Oriented Generative Model Selections on Synthetic Data Training for Fraud Detection Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00974/) (2024)
- [Improve Fidelity and Utility of Synthetic Credit Card Transaction Time Series from Data-centric Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00965/) (2024)
- [Data-driven Energy Consumption Modelling for Electric Micromobility using an Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17632/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The switch from a Model-Centric to a Data-Centric mindset is putting emphasis on data and its quality rather than algorithms, bringing forward new challenges. In particular, the sensitive nature of the information in highly regulated scenarios needs to be accounted for. Specific approaches to address the privacy issue have been developed, as Privacy Enhancing Technologies. However, they frequently cause loss of information, putting forward a crucial trade-off among data quality and privacy. A clever way to bypass such a conundrum relies on Synthetic Data: data obtained from a generative process, learning the real data properties. Both Academia and Industry realized the importance of evaluating synthetic data quality: without all-round reliable metrics, the innovative data generation task has no proper objective function to maximize. Despite that, the topic remains under-explored. For this reason, we systematically catalog the important traits of synthetic data quality and privacy, and devise a specific methodology to test them. The result is DAISYnt (aDoption of Artificial Intelligence SYnthesis): a comprehensive suite of advanced tests, which sets a de facto standard for synthetic data evaluation. As a practical use-case, a variety of generative algorithms have been trained on real-world Credit Bureau Data. The best model has been assessed, using DAISYnt on the different synthetic replicas. Further potential uses, among others, entail auditing and fine-tuning of generative models or ensuring high quality of a given synthetic dataset. From a prescriptive viewpoint, eventually, DAISYnt may pave the way to synthetic data adoption in highly regulated domains, ranging from Finance to Healthcare, through Insurance and Education.