Research on WGAN models with Rényi Differential Privacy

Sujin Lee, Cheolhee Park, Dowon Hong, Jae-kum Kim

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2021.48.1.128

Personal data is collected through various services and managers extract values from the collected data and provide individually customized services by analyzing the results. However, data that contains sensitive information, such as medical data, must be protected from privacy breaches. Accordingly, to mitigate privacy invasion, Generative Adversarial Network(GAN) is widely used as a model for generating synthetic data. Still, privacy vulnerabilities exist because GAN models can learn not only the characteristics of the original data but also the sensitive information contained in the original data. Hence, many studies have been conducted to protect the privacy of GAN models. In particular, research has been actively conducted in the field of differential privacy, which is a strict privacy notion. But it is insufficient to apply it to real environments in terms of the usefulness of the data. In this paper, we studied GAN models with Rényi differential privacy, which preserve the utility of the original data while ensuring privacy protection. Specifically, we focused on WGAN and WGAN-GP models, compared synthetic data generated from non-private and differentially private models, and analyzed data utility in each scenario.