Data class imbalance is a common problem in classification problems, where minority class samples are often more important and more costly to misclassify in a classification task. Therefore, it is very important to solve the data class imbalance classification problem. The SMART dataset exhibits an evident class imbalance, comprising a substantial quantity of healthy samples and a comparatively limited number of defective samples. This dataset serves as a reliable indicator of the disc's health status. In this paper, we obtain the best balanced disk SMART dataset for a specific classification model by mixing and integrating the data synthesised by multivariate generative adversarial networks (GAN) to balance the disk SMART dataset at the data level; and combine it with genetic algorithms to obtain higher disk fault classification prediction accuracy on a specific classification model.

Tabular data synthesis is an emerging approach to circumvent strict regulations on data privacy while discovering knowledge through big data. Although state-of-the-art AI-based tabular data synthesizers, e.g., table-GAN, CTGAN, TVAE, and CTAB-GAN, are effective at generating synthetic tabular data, their training is sensitive to column permutations of input data. In this paper, we first conduct an extensive empirical study to disclose such a property of permutation invariance and an in-depth analysis of the existing synthesizers. We show that changing the input column order worsens the statistical difference between real and synthetic data by up to 38.67% due to the encoding of tabular data and the network architectures. To fully unleash the potential of big synthetic tabular data, we propose two solutions: (i) AE-GAN, a synthesizer that uses an autoencoder network to represent the tabular data and GAN networks to synthesize the latent representation, and (ii) a feature sorting algorithm to find the suitable column order of input data for CNN-based synthesizers. We evaluate the proposed solutions on five datasets in terms of the sensitivity to the column permutation, the quality of synthetic data, and the utility in downstream analyses. Our results show that we enhance the property of permutation-invariance when training synthesizers and further improve the quality and utility of synthetic data, up to 22%, compared to the existing synthesizers.

We devise a novel conditional tabular data synthesizer, CTAB-GAN, that addresses the limitations of the prior state-of-the-art: (i) encoding mixed data type of continuous and categorical variables, (ii) efficient modeling of long tail continuous variables and (iii) increased robustness to imbalanced categorical variables along with skewed continuous variables. Furthermore, two key features of CTAB-GAN are the introduction of classification loss in conditional GAN, and novel encoding for the conditional vector that efficiently encodes mixed variables and helps to deal with highly skewed distributions for continuous variables.