Using UMAP for Partially Synthetic Healthcare Tabular Data Generation and Validation

In healthcare, vast amounts of data are increasingly collected through sensors for smart health applications and patient monitoring or diagnosis. However, such medical data often comprise sensitive patient information, posing challenges regarding data privacy, and are resource-intensive to acquire for significant research purposes. In addition, the common case of lack of information due to technical issues, transcript errors, or differences between descriptors considered in different health centers leads to the need for data imputation and partial data generation techniques. This study introduces a novel methodology for partially synthetic tabular data generation, designed to reduce the reliance on sensor measurements and ensure secure data exchange. Using the UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) visualization algorithm to transform the original, high-dimensional reference data set into a reduced-dimensional space, we generate and validate synthetic values for incomplete data sets. This approach mitigates the need for extensive sensor readings while addressing data privacy concerns by generating realistic synthetic samples. The proposed method is validated on prostate and breast cancer data sets, showing its effectiveness in completing and augmenting incomplete data sets using fully available references. Furthermore, our results demonstrate superior performance in comparison to state-of-the-art imputation techniques. This work makes a dual contribution by not only proposing an innovative method for synthetic data generation, but also studying and establishing a formal framework to understand and solve synthetic data generation and imputation problems in sensor-driven environments.