Synthesizing Realistic Data for R&D

Fake it till you make it – from fancy wines to insurance datasets.

Kevin Kuo (RStudio and Kasa AI)
08-14-2020

We introduce the ctgan package for synthesizing datasets. This is meant to be a high level introduction to the research detailed in Generative Synthesis of Insurance Datasets(Kuo 2019), which builds on the work in Modeling Tabular data using Conditional GAN(Xu et al. 2019).

For those of you who want to try the code right away, simply head over to the GitHub repo which has instructions on getting started.

Motivation

Insurance datasets appropriate for research and software prototyping are often difficult to find or don’t exist at all in the public domain. Cellar attempts to solve the discoverability problem, and simulationmachine provides a way to generate data for a very specific application (P&C reserving). By making CTGAN available to R users and performing initial explorations of insurance use cases, we hope to enable another way for datasets to be available to everyone.

“Dr. Conti”

A while back I came across a true-crime documentary, Sour Grapes, detailing the fascinating stint of Rudy Kurniawan, a wine counterfeiter who defrauded collectors out of millions of dollars worth of bottles. Reportedly an astute taster, Kurniawan would, for example, blend inexpensive Napa Valley wines and fill them in old bottles of prestigious Bordeaux and pass them off as such at auctions. Because he had access to many of the genuine bottles, he had plenty of data points to learn from. This process of coming up with realistic fake bottles, I felt, is a great analogy of adversarial generation of datasets.

CTGAN

CTGAN is a method for generating tabular data proposed in a 2019 NeurIPS paper (Xu et al. 2019). Let’s first take a look at the architecture in Figure 1.

Here, $$G$$ stands for Generator, or, in our case, the counterfeiter who comes up with the blend, and $$C$$ stands for Critic, the taster who tries to distinguish a fake bottle from an authentic one. Both the Generator and Critic are parameterized by neural networks. During training, we randomly pick a categorical column and one of its levels, then sample a row from our actual dataset with that particular value. This is the “authentic bottle” that we’ll provide to our Critic. At the same time, this selection of categorical column-level is, together with some randomness, passed to our Generator. Our Generator then produces a row of data, which is the “fake bottle” passed to our Critic, who then has to decide which bottle is the fake one.

In the beginning of the training phase, neither $$G$$ or $$C$$ does very well—a casual drinker new to wine would likely have a hard time telling the difference between a Grand Cru red Burgundy and a Charles Shaw Cab1. However, as we provide more and more feedback to both, we’d hope they get better at their jobs.

Insurance examples

To see how well ctgan works, we try it out on a couple well studied insurance datasets, one from P&C and one from Life. In one use case, we consider the French Motor Third Party Liability dataset for frequency modeling, and in the other we consider an SOA Experience Study dataset for shock lapse modeling. We evaluate the performance of the method via three perspectives:

1. Machine learning efficacy: how do predictive models trained on synthesized data perform relative to models trained on real data, when it comes to predicting responses in actual holdout data?
2. Variable distribution similarity: do variable distributions, for both continuous and categorical variables, look similar across the synthesized and real datasets?
3. GLM coefficient similarity: do the coefficients for the models trained on synthesized and real datasets exhibit similar patterns?

It turns out that for points 1 and 2, we do pretty well. Table 1 shows the cross validated performance metrics2.

Table 1: Average cross-validated metrics of models trained on real and synthetic data.
Dataset Mean RMSE (Real Data) Mean RMSE (Synthetic Data) Relative Difference
TPL Frequency 0.2367 0.2419 2.21%
Shock Lapse 4.0038 4.0203 0.41%

Figures 2 and 3 show the distributions of a couple variables for a synthesized dataset and its real counterpart. We see that they’re similar enough, qualitatively, for the most part. Now, for point 3, our method falls a bit short, at least in our experiments. For example, in Figures 4 and 5 we show GLM relativities of models fit on real and synthesized datasets. Of course, YMMV when it comes to your own datasets. Also, in some cases, too much similarity in distributions or parameters may be troubling, if one is concerned about identifiability, but that’s readily fixed by obfuscating the data manually. All in all, perhaps our trained models won’t be able to reproduce that ‘82 Latour, but it’d be able to come up with something that resembles a Bordeaux blend.

Conclusion

In this post, we provide a quick overview of the ctgan package and experiments on insurance datasets. We encourage you to try it out and perhaps start thinking about sharing some anonymized datasets :)

Kuo, Kevin. 2019. “Generative Synthesis of Insurance Datasets.” http://arxiv.org/abs/1912.02423.

Xu, Lei, Maria Skoularidou, Alfredo Cuesta-Infante, and Kalyan Veeramachaneni. 2019. “Modeling Tabular Data Using Conditional Gan.” http://arxiv.org/abs/1907.00503.

1. The former is made from Pinot Noir grapes, which are thin skinned and would look lighter in the glass, and have higher acidity. The latter, aka Two Buck Chuck, has a completely different flavor profile (and can be found at your local Trader Joe’s for \$3.99 for our American readers).↩︎

2. The paper has details on how this cross-validation is carried out↩︎