arXiv Machine Learning

MIND: Marginal-Invariant Neural Dependency Diffusion for Mixed-Type Tabular Generation

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

Beyond Distributional Fidelity: Causal-Penalized Diffusion for Synthetic Tabular Data

The paper introduces a causal‑penalized diffusion model for generating synthetic tabular data, arguing that high statistical fidelity does not guarantee accurate causal inference. It defines causal fidelity as the discrepancy between inferential distributions from real and synthetic data and proposes a training framework that adds a causal discrepancy penalty to the generative objective. Experiments on treatment‑effect simulations and benchmark datasets demonstrate that the method can improve causal fidelity while maintaining competitive statistical fidelity.

By Lan Tao, Yongxian He, Shirong Xu, Yidong Ouyang, Guang Cheng