FCT-GAN: Enhancing Global Correlation of Table Synthesis via Fourier Transform

An alternative method for sharing knowledge while complying with strict data access regulations, such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is the emergence of synthetic tabular data. Mainstream table synthesizers utilize methodologies derived from Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Although several state-of-the-art (SOTA) tabular GAN algorithms inherit Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based architectures, which have proven effective for images, they tend to overlook two critical properties of tabular data: (i) the global correlation across columns, and (ii) the semantic invariance to the column order. Permuting columns in a table does not alter the semantic meaning of the data, but features extracted by CNNs can change significantly due to their limited convolution filter kernel size. To address the above problems, we propose FCT-GAN the first conditional tabular GAN to adopt Fourier networks into table synthesis. FCT-GAN enhances permutation invariant GAN training by strengthening the learning of global correlations via Fourier layers. Extensive evaluation on benchmarks and real-world datasets show that FCT-GAN can synthesize tabular data with better (up to 27.8%) machine learning utility (i.e. a proxy of global correlations) and higher (up to 26.5%) statistical similarity to real data. FCT-GAN also has the least variation on synthetic data quality among 7 SOTA baselines on 3 different training-data column orders.