A conversation with Quants, Thinkers and Innovators all challenged to innovate in turbulent times!

Join QuantUniversity for a complimentary summer speaker series where you will hear from Quants, innovators, startups and Fintech experts on various topics in Quant Investing, Machine Learning, Optimization, Fintech, AI etc.

Topic: Generating Synthetic Data with Generative Adversarial Networks: Opportunities and Challenges

Limited data access continues to be a barrier to data-driven product development. In this talk, we explore if and how generative adversarial networks (GANs) can be used to incentivize data sharing by enabling a generic framework for sharing synthetic datasets with minimal expert knowledge.

We identify key challenges of existing GAN approaches with respect to fidelity (e.g., capturing complex multidimensional correlations, mode collapse) and privacy (i.e., existing guarantees are poorly understood and can sacrifice fidelity).

To address fidelity challenges, we discuss our experiences designing a custom workflow called DoppelGANger and demonstrate that across diverse real-world datasets (e.g., bandwidth measurements, cluster requests, web sessions) and use cases (e.g., structural characterization, predictive modeling, algorithm comparison), DoppelGANger achieves up to 43% better fidelity than baseline models.

With respect to privacy, we identify fundamental challenges with both classical notions of privacy as well as recent advances to improve the privacy properties of GANs, and suggest a potential roadmap for addressing these challenges.