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Winning the NIST Contest: A scalable and general approach to differentially private synthetic data

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arxiv 2108.04978 v1 pith:HIGU6KMJ submitted 2021-08-11 cs.CR

classification cs.CR
keywords dataapproachgeneralsyntheticmarginalsmechanismnist-mstdifferentially
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We propose a general approach for differentially private synthetic data generation, that consists of three steps: (1) select a collection of low-dimensional marginals, (2) measure those marginals with a noise addition mechanism, and (3) generate synthetic data that preserves the measured marginals well. Central to this approach is Private-PGM, a post-processing method that is used to estimate a high-dimensional data distribution from noisy measurements of its marginals. We present two mechanisms, NIST-MST and MST, that are instances of this general approach. NIST-MST was the winning mechanism in the 2018 NIST differential privacy synthetic data competition, and MST is a new mechanism that can work in more general settings, while still performing comparably to NIST-MST. We believe our general approach should be of broad interest, and can be adopted in future mechanisms for synthetic data generation.

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Forward citations

Cited by 8 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Workload-Preserving Differentially Private Synthetic Data for Causal Inference via Maximum-Entropy Calibration

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Releasing DP synthetic data built from treatment-arm and outcome moments, plus noise-aware multiple imputation, gives calibrated ATE intervals at strict privacy budgets.

  2. Differentially Private Explanations for Clusters

    cs.CR 2025-06 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    DPClustX privately selects the most informative attributes for each cluster and releases noisy histograms only for those attributes, providing differentially private explanations of clustering results.

  3. Where to Intervene? Benchmarking Fairness-Aware Learning on Differentially Private Synthetic Tabular Data

    cs.LG 2026-07 accept novelty 6.0 of 10

    Post-processing fairness methods (ROC and EqOdds) provide the most stable fairness-utility trade-offs when training classifiers on DP synthetic tabular data, outperforming pre- and in-processing interventions.

  4. Is API Access to LLMs Useful for Generating Private Synthetic Tabular Data?

    cs.LG 2025-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    API access to Gemini 1.0 Pro does not improve differentially private synthetic tabular data beyond established non-LLM baselines on the tested datasets and workloads.

  5. Are Data Experts Buying into Differentially Private Synthetic Data? Gathering Community Perspectives

    cs.HC 2024-12 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Interviews with 17 data experts show skepticism toward differentially private synthetic data, a last-resort stance, and a demand for validation against real data.

  6. Quantitative Auditing of AI Fairness with Differentially Private Synthetic Data

    cs.CY 2025-04 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    Fairness metrics computed on differentially private synthetic data differ from real-data values by up to 0.32 for some measures, despite staying below 0.1 on average, across Adult, COMPAS, and Diabetes.

  7. How to DP-fy Your Data: A Practical Guide to Generating Synthetic Data With Differential Privacy

    cs.CR 2025-12 conditional novelty 2.0 of 10

    A practical, extremely thorough survey of differentially private synthetic data generation: methods, privacy units, evaluation metrics, and end-to-end system components across four data modalities.

  8. Synthetic Tabular Data: Methods, Attacks and Defenses

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 1.0 of 10

    A review of tabular synthetic data generation, privacy attacks, and defenses, whose central message is that synthetic data alone does not guarantee privacy.

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