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A principled library for tuning, training, and evaluating tabular data synthesis. [Technical Report]

Why SynMeter:

• 💫 Easy to add new synthesizers, seamlessly tuning, training, and evaluating various synthesizers.
• 🌀 principled evaluation metrics for fidelity, privacy, and utility.
• 🔥 Several SoTA synthesizers, by type:
  • Statistical methods: PGM, PrivSyn
  • GAN-based: CTGAN, PATE-GAN
  • VAE-based: TVAE
  • Diffusion-based: TabDDPM, TableDiffusion
  • LLM-based: GReaT

🚀 Installation

Create a new conda environment and setup:

conda create -n synmeter python==3.9
conda activate synmeter
pip install -r requirements.txt # install dependencies
pip install -e . # package the library

Change the base dictionary in ./lib/info/ROOT_DIR:

ROOT_DIR = root_to_synmeter

💥 Usage

Datasets

• SynMeter provides 12 standardized datasets with train/val/test datasets for benchmarking, which can be downloaded from here: Google Drive
• You can also easily use an additional dataset by putting it to ./dataset.

Tune evaluators for utility evaluations

• Machine learning affinity requires machine learning models with tuned hyperparameters, SynMeter provides 8 commonly-used machine learning models and their configurations in ./exp/evaluators.
• You can tune these evaluators on your customized dataset:

python scripts/tune_evaluator.py -d [dataset] -c [cuda]

Tune synthesizer

We provide a unified tuning objective for model tuning, thus, all kinds of synthesizers can be tuned by just a single command:

python scripts/tune_synthesizer.py -d [dataset] -m [synthesizer] -s [seed] -c [cuda]

Train synthesizer

After tuning, a configuration should be recorded to /exp/dataset/synthesizer, SynMeter can use it to train and store the synthesizer:

python scripts/train_synthesizer.py -d [dataset] -m [synthesizer] -s [seed] -c [cuda]

Evaluate synthesizer

Assessing the fidelity of the synthetic data:

python scripts/eval_fidelity.py -d [dataset] -m [synthesizer] -s [seed] -t [target] 

Assessing the privacy of the synthetic data:

python scripts/eval_privacy.py -d [dataset] -m [synthesizer] -s [seed]

Assessing the utility of the synthetic data:

python scripts/eval_utility.py -d [dataset] -m [synthesizer] -s [seed]

The results of the evaluations should be saved under the corresponding dictionary /exp/dataset/synthesizer.

📖 Customize your own synthesizer

One advantage of SynMeter is to provide the easiest way to add new synthesis algorithms, three steps are needed:

1. Write new synthesis code in modularity into ./synthesizer/my_synthesiszer
2. Create a base configuration in ./exp/base_config.
3. Create a calling python function in ./synthesizer, which contain three functions: train, sample, and tune.

Then, you are free to tune, run, and test the new synthesizer!

🔑 Methods

Statistical methods

Method	Type	Description	Reference
PGM	DP	The method uses probabilistic graphical models to learn the dependence of low-dimensional marginals for data synthesis.	Paper
PrivSyn	DP	A non-parametric DP synthesizer, which iteratively updates the synthetic dataset to make it match the target noise marginals.	Paper

Generative adversarial networks (GANs)

Method	Type	Description	Reference
CTGAN	HP	A conditional generative adversarial network that can handle tabular data.	Paper
PATE-GAN	DP	The method uses the Private Aggregation of Teacher Ensembles (PATE) framework and applies it to GANs.	Paper

Variational autoencoders (VAE)

Method	Type	Description	Reference
TVAE	HP	A conditional VAE network which can handle tabular data.	Paper

Diffusion models

Method	Type	Description	Reference
TabDDPM	HP	TabDDPM: Modelling Tabular Data with Diffusion Models.	Paper
TableDiffusion	DP	Generating tabular datasets under differential privacy.	Paper

Large Language Model (LLM)-based models

Method	Type	Description	Reference
GReaT	HP	Language Models are Realistic Tabular Data Generators	Paper

⚡ Evaluation metrics

• Fidelity metrics: we consider the Wasserstein distance as a principled fidelity metric, which is calculated by all one and two-way marginals.

• Privacy metrics: we devise a Membership Disclosure Score (MDS) to measure the membership privacy risks of synthesizers.

• Utility metrics: we use machine learning affinity and query error to measure the utility of synthetic data.

Please see our paper for details and usages.

🌈 Acknowledge

Many excellent synthesis algorithms and open-source libraries are used in this project:

• Synthetic Data Vault
• Synthcity