Background Deep generative models (DGMs) present a promising avenue for generating realistic, synthetic data to augment existing health care datasets. However, exactly how the completeness of the original dataset affects the quality of the generated synthetic data is unclear.

Objectives In this paper, we investigate the effect of data completeness on samples generated by the most common DGM paradigms.

Methods We create both cross-sectional and panel datasets with varying missingness and subset rates and train generative adversarial networks, variational autoencoders, and autoregressive models (Transformers) on these datasets. We then compare the distributions of generated data with original training data to measure similarity.

Results We find that increased incompleteness is directly correlated with increased dissimilarity between original and generated samples produced through DGMs.

Conclusions Care must be taken when using DGMs to generate synthetic data as data completeness issues can affect the quality of generated data in both panel and cross-sectional datasets.

∗Contributed equally.

Received: 29 June 2022

Accepted: 31 January 2023

Accepted Manuscript online:
31 January 2023

Article published online:
10 March 2023

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