Data availability is critical for understanding complex disease pathways and developing robust predictive models. Although high-throughput omics technologies have improved insight into disease mechanisms, data acquisition from inaccessible tissues such as the central nervous system remains a major limitation, causing small sample sizes and complicating early prediction of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Generative modeling has emerged as a powerful approach for synthesizing data to support downstream clustering and prediction with small sample size, but existing methods rarely handle high-dimensional tabular omics data effectively. Adversarial random forests (ARFs) provide a well-performing framework for tabular data generation but are not designed for high-dimensional settings. To address this limitation, we introduce high-dimensional ARF (h-ARF), an extension of ARF optimized for integrated clinical and high-dimensional omics data. Using benchmarks across nine datasets and eight performance metrics, we show that h-ARF better preserves both feature distributions, and downstream clustering and prediction utilities compared with ARFs. The method is implemented in the opensource R package harf, available on CRAN.
C. Fouodo, J. Kapar, Anke Huels et al.· bioRxiv· 0 citations
Abstract Background Synthetic data hold substantial potential to address practical challenges in epidemiology due to restricted data access and privacy concerns. However, many current methods suffer from limited quality, high computational demands, and complexity for non-experts. Furthermore, common evaluation strategies for synthetic data often fail to directly reflect statistical utility and measure privacy risks sufficiently. Against this background, a critical underexplored question is whether synthetic data can reliably reproduce key findings from epidemiological research while preserving privacy. Methods We propose adversarial random forests (ARF) as an efficient and convenient method for synthesizing tabular epidemiological data. To evaluate its performance, we replicated statistical analyses from six epidemiological publications covering blood pressure, anthropometry, myocardial infarction, accelerometry, loneliness, and diabetes, from the German National Cohort (NAKO Gesundheitsstudie), the Bremen STEMI Registry U45 Study, and the Guelph Family Health Study. We further assessed how dataset dimensionality and variable complexity affect the quality of synthetic data, and contextualized ARF’s performance by comparison with commonly used tabular data synthesizers in terms of utility, privacy, generalization, and runtime. Results Across all replicated studies, results on ARF-generated synthetic data consistently aligned with original findings. Even for datasets with relatively low sample size-to-dimensionality ratios, replication outcomes closely matched the original results across descriptive and inferential analyses. Reduced dimensionality and variable complexity further enhanced synthesis quality. ARF demonstrated favourable performance regarding utility, privacy preservation, and generalization relative to other synthesizers and superior computational efficiency. Conclusions In summary, ARF reliably generates high-quality synthetic data that replicate diverse epidemiological analyses while offering a competitive privacy–utility trade-off.
J. Kapar, K. Günther, L. Vallis et al.· International Journal of Epi...· 1 citation
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