Andrea Coser

Ciro Antonio Mami, Andrea Coser, Eric Medvet et al.

Synthetic data generation has recently gained widespread attention as a more reliable alternative to traditional data anonymization. The involved methods are originally developed for image synthesis. Hence, their application to the typically tabular and relational datasets from healthcare, finance and other industries is non-trivial. While substantial research has been devoted to the generation of realistic tabular datasets, the study of synthetic relational databases is still in its infancy. In this paper, we combine the variational autoencoder framework with graph neural networks to generate realistic synthetic relational databases. We then apply the obtained method to two publicly available databases in computational experiments. The results indicate that real databases' structures are accurately preserved in the resulting synthetic datasets, even for large datasets with advanced data types.

Davide Scassola, Andrea Coser, Sebastiano Saccani

Tabular data sharing under privacy constraints is increasingly important for research and collaboration. Synthetic data generators (SDGs) are a promising solution, but synthetic data remains vulnerable to attacks, such as membership inference attacks (MIAs), which aim to determine whether a specific record was part of the training data. State-of-the-art MIAs are powerful but impractical: they rely on shadow modeling, requiring hundreds of SDG training runs, and need auxiliary data several times larger than the original training set. Fast proxy metrics like distance to closest record (DCR) are efficient but have limited sensitivity to MIA risk. We introduce ReMIA (Relative Membership Inference Attack), a practical privacy metric that requires only two SDG training runs and additional data no larger than the original training set. Rather than predicting whether a record was in the training set, ReMIA generates two synthetic datasets from two source datasets and measures whether a classifier can identify which source a record came from. Experiments across multiple tabular datasets and SDGs show that ReMIA has a sensitivity comparable to state-of-the-art MIAs while being substantially more practical. We further observe that SDGs can achieve privacy-utility trade-offs that traditional noise-based anonymization methods do not match. Code is available at https://github.com/aindo-com/remia.