PhD Seminar • Differential Privacy | Data Cleaning • Differentially Private Data Generation with Missing Data

Please note: This PhD seminar will take place in DC 1304 and online.

Shubhankar Mohapatra, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Supervisor: Professor Xi He

Despite several works that succeed in generating synthetic data with differential privacy (DP) guarantees, they are inadequate for generating high-quality synthetic data when the input data has missing values.

In this work, we formalize the problems of DP synthetic data with missing values and propose three effective adaptive strategies that significantly improve the utility of the synthetic data on four real-world datasets with different types and levels of missing data and privacy requirements. We also identify the relationship between privacy impact for the complete ground truth data and incomplete data for these DP synthetic data generation algorithms. We model the missing mechanisms as a sampling process to obtain tighter upper bounds for the privacy guarantees to the ground truth data. Overall, this study contributes to a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities for using private synthetic data generation algorithms in the presence of missing data.

To attend this PhD seminar in person, please go to DC 1304. You can also attend virtually using Zoom at https://uwaterloo.zoom.us/j/93405282583.