Differentially Private Synthetic Data Generation for Relational Databases

Existing differentially private (DP) synthetic data generation mechanisms typically assume a single-source table. In practice, data is often distributed across multiple tables with relationships across tables. This study presents the first-of-its-kind algorithm that can be combined with \emph{any} existing DP mechanisms to generate synthetic relational databases. The algorithm iteratively refines the relationship between individual synthetic tables to minimize their approximation errors in terms of low-order marginal distributions while maintaining referential integrity; consequently eliminates the need to flatten a relational database into a master table (saving space), operates efficiently (saving time), and scales effectively to high-dimensional data. We provide both DP and theoretical utility guarantees for our algorithm. Through numerical experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in preserving fidelity to the original data.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Alimohammadi, Kaveh

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Azizan, Navid

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/163540

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/163540