Evaluating Synthetic Data Quality: Advanced Techniques
Chapter 1: Foundations of Synthetic Data Evaluation
Defining Data Quality Dimensions
Challenges in Evaluating Generated Data
The Fidelity-Utility-Privacy Trade-off
Taxonomy of Evaluation Metrics
Setting Up an Evaluation Environment
Chapter 2: Advanced Statistical Fidelity Assessment
Multivariate Distribution Comparisons
Hypothesis Testing for Distributional Similarity
Correlation and Covariance Structure Analysis
Information-Theoretic Measures
Propensity Score Evaluation
Hands-on practical: Implementing Multivariate Tests
Chapter 3: Evaluating Machine Learning Utility
Train-Synthetic-Test-Real (TSTR) Methodology
Train-Real-Test-Synthetic (TRTS) Methodology
Comparing Downstream Model Performance Metrics
Assessing Feature Importance Consistency
Hyperparameter Optimization Effects
Hands-on practical: Running TSTR Evaluations
Chapter 4: Privacy Assessment Techniques
Understanding Privacy Risks in Synthetic Data
Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs)
Attribute Inference Attacks
Distance-Based Privacy Metrics
Differential Privacy Considerations (if applicable)
Hands-on practical: Implementing a Basic MIA
Chapter 5: Specialized and Model-Specific Metrics
Evaluating Synthetic Images: FID, IS, Precision, Recall
Evaluating Synthetic Text: Perplexity, BLEU Scores
Evaluating Synthetic Time-Series Data
Metrics for GAN Evaluation
Metrics for VAE Evaluation
Hands-on practical: Calculating FID for Image Data
Chapter 6: Building Comprehensive Evaluation Reports
Selecting Appropriate Metrics for the Task
Automating Evaluation Pipelines
Visualizing Evaluation Results Effectively
Interpreting and Communicating Findings
Benchmarking Different Synthetic Datasets
Practice: Generating a Quality Report Snippet
Propensity Score Evaluation
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- The central role of the propensity score in observational studies for causal effects, Paul R. Rosenbaum, Donald B. Rubin, 1983 Biometrika, Vol. 70 (Oxford University Press) DOI: 10.1093/biomet/70.1.41 - This foundational paper introduces the concept of propensity scores for balancing covariates in observational studies, providing the origin of the term used in this section.
- Generative Adversarial Nets, Ian J. Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio, 2014 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2014) DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1406.2661 - This seminal paper introduces Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), where a discriminator network learns to distinguish between real and generated data, conceptually mirroring the 'distinguisher' model used in propensity score evaluation for synthetic data.