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Main Authors: Griesbauer, Elisabeth, Czado, Claudia, Frigessi, Arnoldo, Haff, Ingrid Hobæk
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15972
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author Griesbauer, Elisabeth
Czado, Claudia
Frigessi, Arnoldo
Haff, Ingrid Hobæk
author_facet Griesbauer, Elisabeth
Czado, Claudia
Frigessi, Arnoldo
Haff, Ingrid Hobæk
contents We propose TVineSynth, a vine copula based synthetic tabular data generator, which is designed to balance privacy and utility, using the vine tree structure and its truncation to do the trade-off. Contrary to synthetic data generators that achieve DP by globally adding noise, TVineSynth performs a controlled approximation of the estimated data generating distribution, so that it does not suffer from poor utility of the resulting synthetic data for downstream prediction tasks. TVineSynth introduces a targeted bias into the vine copula model that, combined with the specific tree structure of the vine, causes the model to zero out privacy-leaking dependencies while relying on those that are beneficial for utility. Privacy is here measured with membership (MIA) and attribute inference attacks (AIA). Further, we theoretically justify how the construction of TVineSynth ensures AIA privacy under a natural privacy measure for continuous sensitive attributes. When compared to competitor models, with and without DP, on simulated and on real-world data, TVineSynth achieves a superior privacy-utility balance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_15972
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TVineSynth: A Truncated C-Vine Copula Generator of Synthetic Tabular Data to Balance Privacy and Utility
Griesbauer, Elisabeth
Czado, Claudia
Frigessi, Arnoldo
Haff, Ingrid Hobæk
Machine Learning
We propose TVineSynth, a vine copula based synthetic tabular data generator, which is designed to balance privacy and utility, using the vine tree structure and its truncation to do the trade-off. Contrary to synthetic data generators that achieve DP by globally adding noise, TVineSynth performs a controlled approximation of the estimated data generating distribution, so that it does not suffer from poor utility of the resulting synthetic data for downstream prediction tasks. TVineSynth introduces a targeted bias into the vine copula model that, combined with the specific tree structure of the vine, causes the model to zero out privacy-leaking dependencies while relying on those that are beneficial for utility. Privacy is here measured with membership (MIA) and attribute inference attacks (AIA). Further, we theoretically justify how the construction of TVineSynth ensures AIA privacy under a natural privacy measure for continuous sensitive attributes. When compared to competitor models, with and without DP, on simulated and on real-world data, TVineSynth achieves a superior privacy-utility balance.
title TVineSynth: A Truncated C-Vine Copula Generator of Synthetic Tabular Data to Balance Privacy and Utility
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15972