Inference With Combining Rules From Multiple Differentially Private Synthetic Datasets
This work addresses the problem of reliable statistical analysis for researchers and practitioners using privacy-protected synthetic data, but it is incremental as it adapts existing methods from missing data imputation.
The paper tackles the challenge of performing statistical inference using multiple differentially private synthetic datasets by extending combining rules from missing data imputation. The results show that these rules can provide accurate inference in some contexts but not consistently across all cases.
Differential privacy (DP) has been accepted as a rigorous criterion for measuring the privacy protection offered by random mechanisms used to obtain statistics or, as we will study here, synthetic datasets from confidential data. Methods to generate such datasets are increasingly numerous, using varied tools including Bayesian models, deep neural networks and copulas. However, little is still known about how to properly perform statistical inference with these differentially private synthetic (DIPS) datasets. The challenge is for the analyses to take into account the variability from the synthetic data generation in addition to the usual sampling variability. A similar challenge also occurs when missing data is imputed before analysis, and statisticians have developed appropriate inference procedures for this case, which we tend extended to the case of synthetic datasets for privacy. In this work, we study the applicability of these procedures, based on combining rules, to the analysis of DIPS datasets. Our empirical experiments show that the proposed combining rules may offer accurate inference in certain contexts, but not in all cases.