  Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been used in many different
applications to generate realistic synthetic data. We introduce a novel GAN
with Autoencoder (GAN-AE) architecture to generate synthetic samples for
variable length, multi-feature sequence datasets. In this model, we develop a
GAN architecture with an additional autoencoder component, where recurrent
neural networks (RNNs) are used for each component of the model in order to
generate synthetic data to improve classification accuracy for a highly
imbalanced medical device dataset. In addition to the medical device dataset,
we also evaluate the GAN-AE performance on two additional datasets and
demonstrate the application of GAN-AE to a sequence-to-sequence task where both
synthetic sequence inputs and sequence outputs must be generated. To evaluate
the quality of the synthetic data, we train encoder-decoder models both with
and without the synthetic data and compare the classification model
performance. We show that a model trained with GAN-AE generated synthetic data
outperforms models trained with synthetic data generated both with standard
oversampling techniques such as SMOTE and Autoencoders as well as with state of
the art GAN-based models.
