SMOOTH-GAN: Towards Sharp and Smooth Synthetic EHR Data Generation

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been highly successful for generating realistic synthetic data. In healthcare, synthetic data generation can be helpful for producing annotated data and improving data-driven research without worries on data privacy. However, electronic health records (EHRs) are noisy, incomplete and complex, and existing work on EHR data is mainly devoted to generating discrete elements such as diagnosis codes and medications or frequent laboratory values. In this work, we propose SMOOTH-GAN, a novel approach for generating reliable EHR data such as laboratory values and medications given diagnosis codes. SMOOTH-GAN takes advantage of a conditional GAN architecture with WGAN-GP loss, and is able to learn transitions between disease stages with high flexibility over data customization. Our experiments demonstrate the model’s effectiveness in terms of both statistical similarity and accuracy on machine learning based prediction. To further demonstrate the usage of our model, we apply counterfactual reasoning and generate data with occurrence of multiple diseases, which can provide unique datasets for artificial intelligence driven healthcare research.