Synthetic Data Generation for the Financial Industry Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Abstract: Following the introduction of new laws and regulations to ensure data protection in GDPR and PIPEDA, interests in technologies to protect data privacy have increased. A promising research trajectory in this area is found in Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), an architecture trained to produce data that reflects the statistical properties of its underlying dataset without compromising the integrity of the data subjects. Despite the technology’s young age, prior research has made significant progress in the generation process of so-called synthetic data, and the current models can generate images with high-quality. Due to the architecture’s success with images, it has been adapted to new domains, and this study examines its potential to synthesize financial tabular data. The study investigates a state-of-the-art model within tabular GANs, called CTGAN, together with two proposed ideas to enhance its generative ability. The results indicate that a modified training dynamic and a novel early stopping strategy improve the architecture’s capacity to synthesize data. The generated data presents realistic features with clear influences from its underlying dataset, and the inferred conclusions on subsequent analyses are similar to those based on the original data. Thus, the conclusion is that GANs has great potential to generate tabular data that can be considered a substitute for sensitive data, which could enable organizations to have more generous data sharing policies.