# Synthetic Health-related Longitudinal Data with Mixed-type Variables Generated using Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12281 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12281/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 56 of its 106 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Medical imaging and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/medical-imaging-and-segmentation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning without Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02900/) (2018)
- [Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04406/) (2018)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [Tackling the Generative Learning Trilemma with Denoising Diffusion GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07804/) (2021)
- [SRDiff: Single Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14951/) (2021)
- [Autoencoding beyond pixels using a learned similarity metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.09300/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [A Survey on Diffusion Models for Time Series and Spatio-Temporal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18886/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Synthetic Tabular Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16506/) (2025)
- [Reliable Generation of Privacy-preserving Synthetic Electronic Health Record Time Series via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15290/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Generative Diffusion Models for Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04139/) (2023)
- [Diffusion and Flow Matching Models for Tabular Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17119/) (2025)
- [Attention-Based Synthetic Data Generation for Calibration-Enhanced Survival Analysis: A Case Study for Chronic Kidney Disease Using Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06096/) (2025)
- [From Statistical Fidelity to Clinical Consistency: Scalable Generation and Auditing of Synthetic Patient Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06720/) (2026)
- [PRIME-CVD: A Parametrically Rendered Informatics Medical Environment for Education in Cardiovascular Risk Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19299/) (2026)
- [Synthetic but Not Realistic: The Evaluation Challenge in Generative Modelling for Structured Electronic Medical Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08903/) (2026)
- [OncoSynth: Synthetic data generation for treatment effect estimation in oncology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25762/) (2026)
- [HyperNSDE: Personalized Neural SDEs for Joint Static-Longitudinal Clinical Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07383/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a novel approach to simulating electronic health records (EHRs) using diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs). Specifically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of DPMs in synthesising longitudinal EHRs that capture mixed-type variables, including numeric, binary, and categorical variables. To our knowledge, this represents the first use of DPMs for this purpose. We compared our DPM-simulated datasets to previous state-of-the-art results based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) for two clinical applications: acute hypotension and human immunodeficiency virus (ART for HIV). Given the lack of similar previous studies in DPMs, a core component of our work involves exploring the advantages and caveats of employing DPMs across a wide range of aspects. In addition to assessing the realism of the synthetic datasets, we also trained reinforcement learning (RL) agents on the synthetic data to evaluate their utility for supporting the development of downstream machine learning models. Finally, we estimated that our DPM-simulated datasets are secure and posed a low patient exposure risk for public access.