Abstract
Background Deep generative models (DGMs) present a promising avenue for generating realistic,
synthetic data to augment existing health care datasets. However, exactly how the
completeness of the original dataset affects the quality of the generated synthetic
data is unclear.
Objectives In this paper, we investigate the effect of data completeness on samples generated
by the most common DGM paradigms.
Methods We create both cross-sectional and panel datasets with varying missingness and subset
rates and train generative adversarial networks, variational autoencoders, and autoregressive
models (Transformers) on these datasets. We then compare the distributions of generated
data with original training data to measure similarity.
Results We find that increased incompleteness is directly correlated with increased dissimilarity
between original and generated samples produced through DGMs.
Conclusions Care must be taken when using DGMs to generate synthetic data as data completeness
issues can affect the quality of generated data in both panel and cross-sectional
datasets.
Keywords
data quality - data completeness - case completeness - missingness - deep generative
models