PrivateCTGAN: Adapting GAN for Privacy-Aware Tabular Data Sharing

This research addresses the challenge of generating synthetic data that resembles real-world data while preserving privacy. With privacy laws protecting sensitive information such as healthcare data, accessing sufficient training data becomes difficult, resulting in an increased difficulty in training Machine Learning models and in overall worst models. Recently, there has been an increased interest in the usage of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to generate synthetic data since they enable researchers to generate more data to train their models. GANs, however, may not be suitable for privacy-sensitive data since they have no concern for the privacy of the generated data. We propose modifying the known Conditional Tabular GAN (CTGAN) model by incorporating a privacy-aware loss function, thus resulting in the Private CTGAN (PCTGAN) method. Several experiments were carried out using 10 public domain classification datasets and comparing PCTGAN with CTGAN and the state-of-the-art privacy-preserving model, the Differential Privacy CTGAN (DP-CTGAN). The results demonstrated that PCTGAN enables users to fine-tune the privacy fidelity trade-off by leveraging parameters, as well as that if desired, a higher level of privacy.