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Synthetic Tabular Data Detection In the Wild

Published: March 3, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2503.01937v1

By: G. Charbel N. Kindji , Elisa Fromont , Lina Maria Rojas-Barahona and more

Potential Business Impact:

Finds fake computer spreadsheets, even new kinds.

Business Areas:
Data Mining Data and Analytics, Information Technology

Detecting synthetic tabular data is essential to prevent the distribution of false or manipulated datasets that could compromise data-driven decision-making. This study explores whether synthetic tabular data can be reliably identified across different tables. This challenge is unique to tabular data, where structures (such as number of columns, data types, and formats) can vary widely from one table to another. We propose four table-agnostic detectors combined with simple preprocessing schemes that we evaluate on six evaluation protocols, with different levels of ''wildness''. Our results show that cross-table learning on a restricted set of tables is possible even with naive preprocessing schemes. They confirm however that cross-table transfer (i.e. deployment on a table that has not been seen before) is challenging. This suggests that sophisticated encoding schemes are required to handle this problem.

Page Count
14 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Machine Learning (CS)