Synthetic Data Generation Strategies for Pipeline Robustness

Abstract

Machine learning pipelines are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains where robustness against data inconsistencies, bias, and distributional shifts is crucial. However, real-world datasets often suffer from limitations such as data scarcity, class imbalance, and privacy constraints. Synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising strategy to overcome these challenges and enhance pipeline robustness. This paper presents a comprehensive survey and analysis of synthetic data generation techniques, classifying them by data modality, generation method, and application purpose. We explore how synthetic data contributes to the resilience of ML pipelines against failure modes such as concept drift, noise, and adversarial attacks. Through empirical case studies across domains, we demonstrate the practical benefits and limitations of integrating synthetic data into training and evaluation pipelines. Finally, we discuss ethical considerations and outline future research directions toward building more robust, fair, and privacy-preserving ML systems using synthetic data.