Synthesising tabular data using wasserstein conditional gans with gradient penalty (WCGAN-GP)

Deep learning based methods based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have seen remarkable success in data synthesis of images and text. This study investigates the use of GANs for the generation of tabular mixed dataset. We apply Wasserstein Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (WCGAN-GP) to the task of generating tabular synthetic data that is indistinguishable from the real data, without incurring information leakage. The performance of WCGAN-GP is compared against both the ground truth datasets and SMOTE using three labelled real-world datasets from different domains. Our results for WCGAN-GP show that the synthetic data preserves distributions and relationships of the real data, outperforming the SMOTE approach on both class preservation and data protection metrics. Our work is a contribution towards the automated synthesis of tabular mixed data.