Recent advances in tabular data generation have greatly enhanced synthetic data quality. However, extending diffusion models to tabular data is challenging due to the intricately varied distributions and a blend of data types of tabular data. This paper introduces TABSYN, a methodology that synthesizes tabular data by leveraging a diffusion model within a variational autoencoder (VAE) crafted latent space.The key advantages of the proposed TabSyn include (1) Generality: the ability to handle a broad spectrum of data types by converting them into a single unified space and explicitly capture inter-column relations, (2) Quality: optimizing the distribution of latent embeddings to enhance the subsequent training of diffusion models, which helps generate high-quality synthetic data, (3) Speed: much fewer number of reverse steps and faster synthesis speed than existing diffusion-based methods. Extensive experiments on six datasets with five metrics demonstrate that TabSyn outperforms existing methods. Specifically, it reduces the error rates by 86% and 67% for column-wise distribution and pair-wise column correlation estimations compared with the most competitive baselines, its superiority in accuratelylearning the data distributions of tabular data.
Mixed-Type Tabular Data Synthesis with Score-based Diffusion in Latent Space
Hengrui Zhang Jiani Zhang Zhengyuan Shen Balasubramaniam Srinivasan Xiao Qin Christos Faloutsos Huzefa Rangwala George Karypis