Benchmarking Private Population Data Release Mechanisms: Synthetic Data vs. TopDown

arXiv:2401.18024v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) is increasingly used to protect the release of hierarchical, tabular population data, such as census data. A common approach for implementing DP in this setting is to release noisy responses to a predefined set of queries. For example, this is the approach of the TopDown algorithm used by the US Census Bureau. Such methods have an important shortcoming: they cannot answer queries for which they were not optimized. An appealing alternative is …

arxiv benchmarking census cs.cr data differential privacy noisy privacy private protect release synthetic synthetic data