arXiv subjects

Beata Nowok

Publications and source records attributed to Beata Nowok.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Practical privacy metrics for synthetic data

This paper explains how the synthpop package for R has been extended to include functions to calculate measures of identity and attribute disclosure risk for synthetic data that measure risks for the records used to create the synthetic data. The basic function, disclosure, calculates identity disclosure for a set of quasi-identifiers (keys) and attribute disclosure for one variable specified as a target from the same set of keys. The second function, disclosure.summary, is a wrapper for the first and presents summary results for a set of targets. This short paper explains the measures of disclosure risk and documents how they are calculated. We recommend two measures: $RepU$ (replicated uniques) for identity disclosure and $DiSCO$ (Disclosive in Synthetic Correct Original) for attribute disclosure. Both are expressed a \% of the original records and each can be compared to similar measures calculated from the original data. Experience with using the functions on real data found that some apparent disclosures could be identified as coming from relationships in the data that would be expected to be known to anyone familiar with its features. We flag cases when this seems to have occurred and provide means of excluding them. This paper was originally written as a vignette for the R package synthpop, with substantial changes added in February 2026 for synthpop version 1.9-3.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2021

Assessing, visualizing and improving the utility of synthetic data

The synthpop package for R https://www.synthpop.org.uk provides tools to allow data custodians to create synthetic versions of confidential microdata that can be distributed with fewer restrictions than the original. The synthesis can be customized to ensure that relationships evident in the real data are reproduced in the synthetic data. A number of measures have been proposed to assess this aspect, commonly known as the utility of the synthetic data. We show that all these measures, including those calculated from tabulations, can be derived from a propensity score model. The measures will be reviewed and compared, and relations between them illustrated. All the measures compared are highly correlated and some are shown to be identical. The method used to define the propensity score model is more important than the choice of measure. These measures and methods are incorporated into utility modules in the synthpop package that include methods to visualize the results and thus provide immediate feedback to allow the person creating the synthetic data to improve its quality. The utility functions were originally designed to be used for synthetic data objects of class \code{synds}, created by the \pkg{synthpop} function syn() or syn.strata(), but they can now be used to compare one or more synthesised data sets with the original records, where the records are R data frames or lists of data frames.

stat.CO↗

arXiv2017

Guidelines for Producing Useful Synthetic Data

We report on our experiences of helping staff of the Scottish Longitudinal Study to create synthetic extracts that can be released to users. In particular, we focus on how the synthesis process can be tailored to produce synthetic extracts that will provide users with similar results to those that would be obtained from the original data. We make recommendations for synthesis methods and illustrate how the staff creating synthetic extracts can evaluate their utility at the time they are being produced. We discuss measures of utility for synthetic data and show that one tabular utility measure is exactly equivalent to a measure calculated from a propensity score. The methods are illustrated by using the R package $synthpop$ to create synthetic versions of data from the 1901 Census of Scotland.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2016

General and specific utility measures for synthetic data

Data holders can produce synthetic versions of datasets when concerns about potential disclosure restrict the availability of the original records. This paper is concerned with methods to judge whether such synthetic data have a distribution that is comparable to that of the original data, what we will term general utility. We consider how general utility compares with specific utility, the similarity of results of analyses from the synthetic data and the original data. We adapt a previous general measure of data utility, the propensity score mean-squared-error (pMSE), to the specific case of synthetic data and derive its distribution for the case when the correct synthesis model is used to create the synthetic data. Our asymptotic results are confirmed by a simulation study. We also consider two specific utility measures, confidence interval overlap and standardized difference in summary statistics, which we compare with the general utility results. We present two examples examining this comparison of general and specific utility to real data syntheses and make recommendations for their use for evaluating synthetic data.

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arXiv2014

A simplified approach to generating synthetic data for disclosure control

We describe results on the creation and use of synthetic data that were derived in the context of a project to make synthetic extracts available for users of the UK Longitudinal Studies. A critical review of existing methods of inference from large synthetic data sets is presented. We introduce new variance estimates for use with large samples of completely synthesised data that do not require them to be generated from the posterior predictive distribution derived from the observed data. We make recommendations on how to synthesise data based on these findings. An example of synthesising data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study is included to illustrate our results.

stat.ME↗