用非参数高斯核函数生成教育数据,既保隐私又稳准。
Stable and Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Educational Data with Empirical Marginals: A Copula-Based Approach
- 基于经验分布与核函数建模,不依赖深度学习
- 5个数据集上多次生成仍稳定,计算成本低
- 适合需隐私保护的教育数据分析场景
为在严格隐私监管下推进教育数据挖掘,研究人员需在保护敏感学生信息的前提下开展数据驱动分析。合成数据生成是一种可行方案,可释放统计生成样本而非真实学生记录;但现有深度学习和参数化生成方法常扭曲边缘分布,在多次再生时出现分布漂移,导致分布支持逐渐丢失,影响可靠性。为此,我们提出非参数高斯核(NPGC)方法,以经验统计锚定替代深度学习与参数优化,通过核函数框架保留观测边缘分布,并建模变量间依赖关系。NPGC在边缘与相关性层面集成差分隐私(DP),支持异构变量类型,并将缺失数据显式建模为信息状态,保留缺失模式。我们在5个基准数据集上评估了NPGC,结果表明其在多轮再生中保持稳定,下游性能表现良好,且计算开销显著更低。进一步在真实在线学习平台部署验证,证明其在隐私保护研究中的实用性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
To advance Educational Data Mining (EDM) within strict privacy-protecting regulatory frameworks, researchers must develop methods that enable data-driven analysis while protecting sensitive student information. Synthetic data generation is one such approach, enabling the release of statistically generated samples instead of real student records; however, existing deep learning and parametric generators often distort marginal distributions and degrade under iterative regeneration, leading to distribution drift and progressive loss of distributional support that compromise reliability. In response, we introduce the Non-Parametric Gaussian Copula (NPGC), a plug-and-play synthesis method that replaces deep learning and parametric optimization with empirical statistical anchoring to preserve the observed marginal distributions while modeling dependencies through a copula framework. NPGC integrates Differential Privacy (DP) at both the marginal and correlation levels, supports heterogeneous variable types, and treats missing data as an explicit state to retain informative absence patterns. We evaluate NPGC against deep learning and parametric baselines on five benchmark datasets and demonstrate that it remains stable across multiple regeneration cycles and achieves competitive downstream performance at substantially lower computational cost. We further validate NPGC through deployment in a real-world online learning platform, demonstrating its practicality for privacy-preserving research.
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