Applying a Method for Augmenting Data Mixed from Two Different Sources Using Deep Generative Neural Networks to Management Science

Abstract

Although a multimodal data analysis, comprising physiological and questionnaire survey data, provides better insights into addressing management science concerns, such as challenging the predictions of consumer choice behavior, studies in this field are scarce because of two obstacles: limited sample size and information privacy. This study addresses these challenges by synthesizing multimodal data using deep generative models. We obtained multimodal data by conducting an electroencephalography (EEG) experiment and a questionnaire survey on the prediction of skilled nurses. Subsequently, we validated the effectiveness of the synthesized data compared with real data regarding the similarities between these data and the predictive performance. We confirmed that the synthesized big data were almost equal to the real data using the trained models through sufficient epochs. Conclusively, we demonstrated that synthesizing data using deep generative models might overcome two significant concerns regarding multimodal data utilization, including physiological data. Our approach can contribute to the prevailing combined big data from different modalities, such as physiological and questionnaire survey data, when solving management issues.