RAPID: Risk of Attribute Prediction-Induced Disclosure in Synthetic Microdata

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Templ, Matthias, Thees, Oscar, Müller, Roman
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Templ, Matthias
Thees, Oscar
Müller, Roman
author_facet Templ, Matthias
Thees, Oscar
Müller, Roman
contents Statistical data anonymization increasingly relies on fully synthetic microdata, for which classical identity disclosure measures are less informative than an adversary's ability to infer sensitive attributes from released data. We introduce RAPID (Risk of Attribute Prediction--Induced Disclosure), a disclosure risk measure that directly quantifies inferential vulnerability under a realistic attack model. An adversary trains a predictive model solely on the released synthetic data and applies it to real individuals' quasi-identifiers. For continuous sensitive attributes, RAPID reports the proportion of records whose predicted values fall within a specified relative error tolerance. For categorical attributes, we propose a baseline-normalized confidence score that measures how much more confident the attacker is about the true class than would be expected from class prevalence alone, and we summarize risk as the fraction of records exceeding a policy-defined threshold. This construction yields an interpretable, bounded risk metric that is robust to class imbalance, independent of any specific synthesizer, and applicable with arbitrary learning algorithms. We illustrate threshold calibration, uncertainty quantification, and comparative evaluation of synthetic data generators using simulations and real data. Our results show that RAPID provides a practical, attacker-realistic upper bound on attribute-inference disclosure risk that complements existing utility diagnostics and disclosure control frameworks.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_09235
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RAPID: Risk of Attribute Prediction-Induced Disclosure in Synthetic Microdata
Templ, Matthias
Thees, Oscar
Müller, Roman
Machine Learning
Applications
Methodology
62P25
G.3; H.2
Statistical data anonymization increasingly relies on fully synthetic microdata, for which classical identity disclosure measures are less informative than an adversary's ability to infer sensitive attributes from released data. We introduce RAPID (Risk of Attribute Prediction--Induced Disclosure), a disclosure risk measure that directly quantifies inferential vulnerability under a realistic attack model. An adversary trains a predictive model solely on the released synthetic data and applies it to real individuals' quasi-identifiers. For continuous sensitive attributes, RAPID reports the proportion of records whose predicted values fall within a specified relative error tolerance. For categorical attributes, we propose a baseline-normalized confidence score that measures how much more confident the attacker is about the true class than would be expected from class prevalence alone, and we summarize risk as the fraction of records exceeding a policy-defined threshold. This construction yields an interpretable, bounded risk metric that is robust to class imbalance, independent of any specific synthesizer, and applicable with arbitrary learning algorithms. We illustrate threshold calibration, uncertainty quantification, and comparative evaluation of synthetic data generators using simulations and real data. Our results show that RAPID provides a practical, attacker-realistic upper bound on attribute-inference disclosure risk that complements existing utility diagnostics and disclosure control frameworks.
title RAPID: Risk of Attribute Prediction-Induced Disclosure in Synthetic Microdata
topic Machine Learning
Applications
Methodology
62P25
G.3; H.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09235