Contrastive Learning-Based privacy metrics in Tabular Synthetic Datasets

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Hauptverfasser: Palacios, Milton Nicolás Plasencia, Saccani, Sebastiano, Sgroi, Gabriele, Boudewijn, Alexander, Bortolussi, Luca
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Palacios, Milton Nicolás Plasencia
Saccani, Sebastiano
Sgroi, Gabriele
Boudewijn, Alexander
Bortolussi, Luca
author_facet Palacios, Milton Nicolás Plasencia
Saccani, Sebastiano
Sgroi, Gabriele
Boudewijn, Alexander
Bortolussi, Luca
contents Synthetic data has garnered attention as a Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET) in sectors such as healthcare and finance. When using synthetic data in practical applications, it is important to provide protection guarantees. In the literature, two family of approaches are proposed for tabular data: on the one hand, Similarity-based methods aim at finding the level of similarity between training and synthetic data. Indeed, a privacy breach can occur if the generated data is consistently too similar or even identical to the train data. On the other hand, Attack-based methods conduce deliberate attacks on synthetic datasets. The success rates of these attacks reveal how secure the synthetic datasets are. In this paper, we introduce a contrastive method that improves privacy assessment of synthetic datasets by embedding the data in a more representative space. This overcomes obstacles surrounding the multitude of data types and attributes. It also makes the use of intuitive distance metrics possible for similarity measurements and as an attack vector. In a series of experiments with publicly available datasets, we compare the performances of similarity-based and attack-based methods, both with and without use of the contrastive learning-based embeddings. Our results show that relatively efficient, easy to implement privacy metrics can perform equally well as more advanced metrics explicitly modeling conditions for privacy referred to by the GDPR.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_13833
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Contrastive Learning-Based privacy metrics in Tabular Synthetic Datasets
Palacios, Milton Nicolás Plasencia
Saccani, Sebastiano
Sgroi, Gabriele
Boudewijn, Alexander
Bortolussi, Luca
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Synthetic data has garnered attention as a Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET) in sectors such as healthcare and finance. When using synthetic data in practical applications, it is important to provide protection guarantees. In the literature, two family of approaches are proposed for tabular data: on the one hand, Similarity-based methods aim at finding the level of similarity between training and synthetic data. Indeed, a privacy breach can occur if the generated data is consistently too similar or even identical to the train data. On the other hand, Attack-based methods conduce deliberate attacks on synthetic datasets. The success rates of these attacks reveal how secure the synthetic datasets are. In this paper, we introduce a contrastive method that improves privacy assessment of synthetic datasets by embedding the data in a more representative space. This overcomes obstacles surrounding the multitude of data types and attributes. It also makes the use of intuitive distance metrics possible for similarity measurements and as an attack vector. In a series of experiments with publicly available datasets, we compare the performances of similarity-based and attack-based methods, both with and without use of the contrastive learning-based embeddings. Our results show that relatively efficient, easy to implement privacy metrics can perform equally well as more advanced metrics explicitly modeling conditions for privacy referred to by the GDPR.
title Contrastive Learning-Based privacy metrics in Tabular Synthetic Datasets
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13833