GANs in the Panorama of Synthetic Data Generation Methods
Bruno Vaz, Álvaro Figueira
Abstract
This article focuses on the creation and evaluation of synthetic data to address the challenges of imbalanced datasets in machine learning (ML) applications, using fake news detection as a case study. We conducted a thorough literature review on generative adversarial networks (GANs) for tabular data, synthetic data generation methods, and synthetic data quality assessment. By augmenting a public news dataset with synthetic data generated by different GAN architectures, we demonstrate the potential of synthetic data to improve ML models’ performance in fake news detection. Our results show a significant improvement in classification performance, especially in the underrepresented class. We also modify and extend a data usage approach to evaluate the quality of synthetic data and investigate the relationship between synthetic data quality and data augmentation performance in classification tasks. We found a positive correlation between synthetic data quality and performance in the underrepresented class, highlighting the importance of high-quality synthetic data for effective data augmentation.