Abstract
The tabular form constitutes the standard way of representing data in relational database systems and spreadsheets. But, similarly to other forms, tabular data suffers from class imbalance, a problem that causes serious performance degradation in a wide variety of machine learning tasks. One of the most effective solutions dictates the usage of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in order to synthesize artificial data instances for the under-represented classes. Despite their good performance, most of the proposed GAN models do not take into account the vector subspaces of the input samples in the real data space, leading to data generation in arbitrary locations. In addition, the class labels are handled in the same manner as the other categorical variables, so conditional sampling by class is rendered less effective. To overcome these problems, this study presents ctdGAN, a conditional GAN for alleviating class imbalance in tabular datasets. Initially, ctdGAN executes a space partitioning step to assign cluster labels to the input samples. Subsequently, it utilizes these labels to synthesize samples via a novel probabilistic sampling strategy and a new loss function that penalizes both cluster and class mis-predictions. In this way, ctdGAN generates samples in subspaces that resemble those of the original data distribution. We also introduce several other improvements, including a simple, yet effective cluster-wise scaling technique that captures multiple feature modes without affecting data dimensionality. The evaluation of ctdGAN with 14 imbalanced datasets demonstrated its strong ability in generating high fidelity samples and improving classification accuracy.
Explore similar work
Aug 3, 2025cs.LG
Recent advances in continuous conditional generative modeling, including Continuous conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CcGAN) and Continuous Conditional Diffusion Model (CCDM), estimate high-dimensional data distributions conditioned on scalar regression labels such as angles, ages, or temperatures. However, fixed-size vicinal training in CcGAN can be sensitive to non-uniform label densities, whereas CCDM relies on computationally expensive iterative sampling. To address these issues, we propose CcGAN-AVAR, an imbalance-aware extension of CcGAN that combines soft/hybrid adaptive vicinity with auxiliary discriminator-guided regularization. The adaptive vicinity constructs a label-dependent local radius according to the available samples around each target condition, and the multi-task discriminator supplies both a regression signal for label consistency and a density-ratio-estimation signal for distribution matching. We further provide a theoretical interpretation characterizing how adaptive vicinal weighting affects the local bias-variance behavior of the discriminator target, how hybrid truncation reduces objective-level cross-condition mixing, and how the density-ratio-based generator penalty approximates a Pearson Chi-square discrepancy up to the estimation error of the density-ratio branch. Extensive experiments on four datasets, including the newly constructed imbalanced RC-49-I, covering resolutions from 64x64 to 256x256 across eleven settings, demonstrate that CcGAN-AVAR obtains strong generation quality and label consistency while preserving the one-step sampling efficiency of GANs, achieving 300x--2000x faster inference than CCDM.
Xin Ding, Yun Chen, Yongwei Wang +4
Apr 18, 2026cs.LG
Imbalanced data are commonly present in real-world applications. While data synthesis can effectively mitigate data scarcity for rare classes, and LLMs have revolutionized text generation, the application of LLMs to the synthesis of relational/structured tabular data remains underexplored. Moreover, existing approaches lack an effective feedback mechanism to guide LLMs in continuously optimizing the quality of the generated data throughout the synthesis process. In this work, we propose RDDG, Relational Data generator with Dynamic Guidance, which is a unified in-context learning framework that employs progressive chain-of-thought (CoT) steps to generate tabular data for enhancing downstream imbalanced classification performance. RDDG first uses core set selection to identify representative samples from the original data, then utilizes in-context learning to discover the inherent patterns and correlations among attributes within the core set, and subsequently generates tabular data while preserving the aforementioned constraints. More importantly, it incorporates a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism that provides automatic assessments of the quality of the generated data, enabling continuous quality optimization throughout the generation process. Experimental results on multiple real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that RDDG outperforms existing approaches in both data fidelity and downstream imbalanced classification performance. We make our code available at https://github.com/cszhangLMU/RDDG.
Chongsheng Zhang, Hao Wang, Zelong Yu +7
Jul 10, 2026quant-ph
Data scarcity and class imbalance are persistent challenges in machine learning that degrade model generalization and introduce predictive bias. We present a hybrid quantum-classical framework for synthetic data generation using a Quantum Circuit Born Machine (QCBM) to address these limitations. The proposed approach exploits quantum mechanical properties -- superposition and entanglement -- within a parameterized variational quantum circuit to model complex probability distributions that are difficult for classical generative methods to capture. Experiments are conducted on two tabular benchmark datasets: the Iris dataset and the Telco Customer Churn dataset. Preprocessing includes normalization and PCA-based dimensionality reduction to enable efficient basis encoding for quantum circuits. The QCBM is trained by minimizing Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between real and generated data distributions using a gradient-based parameter-shift optimization rule. Augmenting training data with QCBM-generated synthetic samples at 40-50% of the minority class improves F1-score by approximately 5-15% and minority-class recall by 10-25%. Cross-domain evaluations (Train on Synthetic, Test on Real; and Train on Real, Test on Synthetic) reveal a performance gap of only 3-10%, indicating strong distributional fidelity. Comparative analysis against classical oversampling methods -- SMOTE, Borderline-SMOTE, KMeansSMOTE, and SVM-SMOTE -- shows that QCBM achieves competitive classification performance and produces lower Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) on the Telco dataset, suggesting superior structural similarity in certain imbalanced settings. These findings establish QCBM as a viable complementary tool for data augmentation, particularly for low-dimensional structured tabular data with class imbalance.
Tanapol Nuatho, Narisorn Sangnakara, Prapong Prechaprapranwong +1