MO4.R3.2

Differentially Private Synthetic Data with Private Density Estimation

Nikolija Bojkovic, University of Belgrade, Serbia; Po-Ling Loh, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Session:
Differential Privacy in Learning 2

Track:
16: Privacy and Fairness

Location:
Ypsilon IV-V-VI

Presentation Time:
Mon, 8 Jul, 16:45 - 17:05

Session Chair:
Ayfer Ozgur, Stanford University
Abstract
The need to analyze sensitive data, such as medical records or financial data, has created a critical research challenge in recent years. In this paper, we adopt the framework of differential privacy, and explore mechanisms for generating an entire dataset which accurately captures characteristics of the original data. We build upon the work titled "Privacy of Synthetic Data: A Statistical Framework" by Boedihardjo, Strohmer, and Vershynin, which laid the foundations for a new optimization-based algorithm for generating private synthetic data. Importantly, we adapt their algorithm by replacing a uniform sampling step with a private distribution estimator; this allows us to obtain better computational guarantees for discrete distributions, and develop a novel algorithm suitable for continuous distributions. We also explore applications of our work to several statistical tasks.
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