arXiv:2603.10937cs.LGstat.AP2026-03

用核密度估计量化表格型合成数据的成员泄露风险。

Quantifying Membership Disclosure Risk for Tabular Synthetic Data Using Kernel Density Estimators

  • 基于近邻距离分布建模,用核密度估计推断成员身份。
  • 在四个真实数据集上,F1分数优于基线方法,且无需训练影子模型。
  • 适合数据管理者在发布前评估合成数据隐私风险。

合成数据作为医疗、金融等敏感领域保护隐私的数据共享替代方案日益流行。然而,其隐私保障并非绝对,仍可能遭受成员推断攻击(MIA),即攻击者试图判断特定个体是否曾出现在生成器的训练数据中。本文提出一种基于核密度估计(KDE)的实用方法,通过建模合成数据与训练记录间的最近邻距离分布,实现成员身份的概率推断,并借助ROC曲线进行稳健评估。我们设计两种攻击模型:一种为假设可访问训练数据的‘真实分布攻击’,另一种是更现实的‘实际攻击’,使用辅助数据且无真实成员标签。在四个真实数据集和六种合成数据生成器上的实验表明,该方法在所有场景下均获得更高F1分数,且无需计算成本高昂的影子模型。本方法为合成数据的成员泄露风险提供了可落地的量化框架与评估指标,使数据管理者可在发布前完成风险评估。相关数据与代码已开源:https://github.com/PyCoder913/MIA-KDE。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The use of synthetic data has become increasingly popular as a privacy-preserving alternative to sharing real datasets, especially in sensitive domains such as healthcare, finance, and demography. However, the privacy assurances of synthetic data are not absolute, and remain susceptible to membership inference attacks (MIAs), where adversaries aim to determine whether a specific individual was present in the dataset used to train the generator. In this work, we propose a practical and effective method to quantify membership disclosure risk in tabular synthetic datasets using kernel density estimators (KDEs). Our KDE-based approach models the distribution of nearest-neighbour distances between synthetic data and the training records, allowing probabilistic inference of membership and enabling robust evaluation via ROC curves. We propose two attack models: a 'True Distribution Attack', which assumes privileged access to training data, and a more realistic, implementable 'Realistic Attack' that uses auxiliary data without true membership labels. Empirical evaluations across four real-world datasets and six synthetic data generators demonstrate that our method consistently achieves higher F1 scores and sharper risk characterization than a prior baseline approach, without requiring computationally expensive shadow models. The proposed method provides a practical framework and metric for quantifying membership disclosure risk in synthetic data, which enables data custodians to conduct a post-generation risk assessment prior to releasing their synthetic datasets for downstream use. The datasets and codes for this study are available at https://github.com/PyCoder913/MIA-KDE.

合成数据隐私保护成员推断核密度估计

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。