Utility Theory of Synthetic Data Generation

Evaluating the utility of synthetic data is critical for measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of synthetic algorithms. Existing results focus on empirical evaluations of the utility of synthetic data, whereas the theoretical understanding of how utility is affected by synthetic data algorithms remains largely unexplored. This paper establishes utility theory from a statistical perspective, aiming to quantitatively assess the utility of synthetic algorithms based on a general metric. The metric is defined as the absolute difference in generalization between models trained on synthetic and original datasets. We establish analytical bounds for this utility metric to investigate critical conditions for the metric to converge. An intriguing result is that the synthetic feature distribution is not necessarily identical to the original one for the convergence of the utility metric as long as the model specification in downstream learning tasks is correct. Another important utility metric is model comparison based on synthetic data. Specifically, we establish sufficient conditions for synthetic data algorithms so that the ranking of generalization performances of models trained on the synthetic data is consistent with that from the original data. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments using non-parametric models and deep neural networks to validate our theoretical findings.