Synthetic Patient Data Generation and Evaluation in Disease Prediction Using Small and Imbalanced Datasets

IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2023 Jun;27(6):2670-2680. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2022.3196697. Epub 2023 Jun 5.

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of chronic non-communicable diseases makes it a priority to develop tools for enhancing their management. On this matter, Artificial Intelligence algorithms have proven to be successful in early diagnosis, prediction and analysis in the medical field. Nonetheless, two main issues arise when dealing with medical data: lack of high-fidelity datasets and maintenance of patient's privacy. To face these problems, different techniques of synthetic data generation have emerged as a possible solution. In this work, a framework based on synthetic data generation algorithms was developed. Eight medical datasets containing tabular data were used to test this framework. Three different statistical metrics were used to analyze the preservation of synthetic data integrity and six different synthetic data generation sizes were tested. Besides, the generated synthetic datasets were used to train four different supervised Machine Learning classifiers alone, and also combined with the real data. F1-score was used to evaluate classification performance. The main goal of this work is to assess the feasibility of the use of synthetic data generation in medical data in two ways: preservation of data integrity and maintenance of classification performance.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence*
  • Benchmarking
  • Humans
  • Machine Learning*
  • Supervised Machine Learning