Generating Higher-Fidelity Synthetic Datasets with Privacy Guarantees

Abstract

We consider the problem of enhancing user privacy in common data analysis and machine learning development tasks, such as data annotation and inspection, by substituting the real data with samples from a generative adversarial network. We propose employing Bayesian differential privacy as the means to achieve a rigorous theoretical guarantee while providing a better privacy-utility trade-off. We demonstrate experimentally that our approach produces higher-fidelity samples compared to prior work, allowing to (1) detect more subtle data errors and biases, and (2) reduce the need for real data labelling by achieving high accuracy when training directly on artificial samples.

Keywords

• machine learning
• synthetic data
• generative adversarial networks
• privacy