{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/sync-a-copula-based-framework-for-generating","title":"SYNC: A Copula based Framework for Generating Synthetic Data from Aggregated Sources","arxiv_id":"2009.09471","date":"2020-09-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zheng Li","Yue Zhao","Jialin Fu"],"abstract":"A synthetic dataset is a data object that is generated programmatically, and it may be valuable to creating a single dataset from multiple sources when direct collection is difficult or costly. Although it is a fundamental step for many data science tasks, an efficient and standard framework is absent. In this paper, we study a specific synthetic data generation task called downscaling, a procedure to infer high-resolution, harder-to-collect information (e.g., individual level records) from many low-resolution, easy-to-collect sources, and propose a multi-stage framework called SYNC (Synthetic Data Generation via Gaussian Copula). For given low-resolution datasets, the central idea of SYNC is to fit Gaussian copula models to each of the low-resolution datasets in order to correctly capture dependencies and marginal distributions, and then sample from the fitted models to obtain the desired high-resolution subsets. Predictive models are then used to merge sampled subsets into one, and finally, sampled datasets are scaled according to low-resolution marginal constraints. We make four key contributions in this work: 1) propose a novel framework for generating individual level data from aggregated data sources by combining state-of-the-art machine learning and statistical techniques, 2) perform simulation studies to validate SYNC's performance as a synthetic data generation algorithm, 3) demonstrate its value as a feature engineering tool, as well as an alternative to data collection in situations where gathering is difficult through two real-world datasets, 4) release an easy-to-use framework implementation for reproducibility and scalability at the production level that easily incorporates new data.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.09471v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.09471v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"sync-a-copula-based-framework-for-generating","repo_url":"https://github.com/winstonll/SynC","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"feature-engineering","task_name":"Feature Engineering"},{"task_slug":"synthetic-data-generation","task_name":"Synthetic Data Generation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2009.09471","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}