用对抗随机森林生成流行病学数据,能准确复现真实研究结果。
Can synthetic data reproduce real-world findings in epidemiology? A replication study using adversarial random forests
- 基于对抗随机森林生成流行病学表格数据
- 六项真实研究结果在合成数据上均成功复现
- 兼顾隐私保护与计算效率,适合非专家使用
合成数据有望缓解流行病学中因数据受限和隐私问题带来的挑战。然而,现有方法普遍存在质量不高、计算开销大、对非专家不友好等问题,且常用评估策略难以真实反映统计效用和充分衡量隐私风险。本文提出对抗随机森林(ARF)方法,用于高效生成流行病学表格数据。我们复现了来自德国国家队列(NAKO Gesundheitsstudie)、不来梅STEMI注册研究和圭尔夫家庭健康研究的六项流行病学研究,涵盖血压、体成分、心肌梗死、加速度计数据、孤独感和糖尿病。结果显示,在所有复制研究中,基于ARF生成的数据结果与原始结果一致。即使样本量与维度比偏低,描述性和推断性分析结果仍高度吻合。降低维度和变量复杂度进一步提升合成质量。与常见合成器相比,ARF在效用、隐私保护、泛化能力和运行时间方面表现更优。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Synthetic data holds substantial potential to address practical challenges in epidemiology due to restricted data access and privacy concerns. However, many current methods suffer from limited quality, high computational demands, and complexity for non-experts. Furthermore, common evaluation strategies for synthetic data often fail to directly reflect statistical utility and measure privacy risks sufficiently. Against this background, a critical underexplored question is whether synthetic data can reliably reproduce key findings from epidemiological research while preserving privacy. We propose adversarial random forests (ARF) as an efficient and convenient method for synthesizing tabular epidemiological data. To evaluate its performance, we replicated statistical analyses from six epidemiological publications covering blood pressure, anthropometry, myocardial infarction, accelerometry, loneliness, and diabetes, from the German National Cohort (NAKO Gesundheitsstudie), the Bremen STEMI Registry U45 Study, and the Guelph Family Health Study. We further assessed how dataset dimensionality and variable complexity affect the quality of synthetic data, and contextualized ARF's performance by comparison with commonly used tabular data synthesizers in terms of utility, privacy, generalisation, and runtime. Across all replicated studies, results on ARF-generated synthetic data consistently aligned with original findings. Even for datasets with relatively low sample size-to-dimensionality ratios, replication outcomes closely matched the original results across descriptive and inferential analyses. Reduced dimensionality and variable complexity further enhanced synthesis quality. ARF demonstrated favourable performance regarding utility, privacy preservation, and generalisation relative to other synthesizers and superior computational efficiency.
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