Epistemic Parity: Reproducibility as an Evaluation Metric for Differential Privacy

Lucas Rosenblatt, Bernease Herman, Anastasia Holovenko, Wonkwon Lee, Joshua Loftus, Elizabeth McKinnie, Taras Rumezhak, Andrii Stadnik, Bill Howe, Julia Stoyanovich

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Differential privacy (DP) data synthesizers are increasingly proposed to afford public release of sensitive information, offering theoretical guarantees for privacy (and, in some cases, utility), but limited empirical evidence of utility in practical settings. Utility is typically measured as the error on representative proxy tasks, such as descriptive statistics, multivariate correlations, the accuracy of trained classifiers, or performance over a query workload. The ability for these results to generalize to practitioners' experience has been questioned in a number of settings, including the U.S. Census. In this paper, we propose an evaluation methodology for synthetic data that avoids assumptions about the representativeness of proxy tasks, instead measuring the likelihood that published conclusions would change had the authors used synthetic data, a condition we call epistemic parity. Our methodology consists of reproducing empirical conclusions of peer-reviewed papers on real, publicly available data, then re-running these experiments a second time on DP synthetic data and comparing the results.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Pages (from-to)65-74
    Number of pages10
    JournalSIGMOD Record
    Volume53
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    StatePublished - May 14 2024

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Software
    • Information Systems

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