Spending Privacy Budget Fairly and Wisely

Understand

Differentially private (DP) synthetic data generation is a practical method for improving access to data as a means to encourage productive partnerships.

• One issue inherent to DP is that the "privacy budget" is generally "spent" evenly across features in the data set.
• This leads to good statistical parity with the real data, but can undervalue the conditional probabilities and marginals that are critical for predictive quality of synthetic data.
• Further, loss of predictive quality may be non-uniform across the data set, with subsets that correspond to minority groups potentially suffering a higher loss.