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Generative models trained using Differential Privacy (DP) are increasingly used to produce and share synthetic data in a privacy-friendly manner. In this paper, we set out to analyze the impact of DP on these models vis-à-vis underrepresented classes and subgroups of data. We do so from two angles: 1) the size of classes and subgroups in the synthetic data, and 2) classification accuracy on them. We also evaluate the effect of various levels of imbalance and privacy budgets.Our experiments, conducted using three state-of-the-art DP models (PrivBayes, DP-WGAN, and PATE-GAN), show that DP results in opposite size distributions in the generated synthetic data. More precisely, it affects the gap between the majority and minority classes and subgroups, either reducing it (a "Robin Hood" effect) or increasing it ("Matthew" effect). However, both of these size shifts lead to similar disparate impacts on a classifier's accuracy, affecting disproportionately more the underrepresented subparts of the data. As a result, we call for caution when analyzing or training a model on synthetic data, or risk treating different subpopulations unevenly, which might also lead to unreliable conclusions.

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Genomic data provides researchers with an invaluable source of information to advance progress in biomedical research, personalized medicine, and drug development. At the same time, however, this data is extremely sensitive, which makes data sharing, and consequently availability, problematic if not outright impossible. As a result, organizations have begun to experiment with sharing synthetic data, which should mirror the real data's salient characteristics, without exposing it. In this paper, we provide the first evaluation of the utility and the privacy protection of five state-of-the-art models for generating synthetic genomic data.First, we assess the performance of the synthetic data on a number of common tasks, such as allele and population statistics as well as linkage disequilibrium and principal component analysis. Then, we study the susceptibility of the data to membership inference attacks, i.e., inferring whether a target record was part of the data used to train the model producing the synthetic dataset. Overall, there is no single approach for generating synthetic genomic data that performs well across the board. We show how the size and the nature of the training dataset matter, especially in the case of generative models. While some combinations of datasets and models produce synthetic data with distributions close to the real data, there often are target data points that are vulnerable to membership inference. Our measurement framework can be used by practitioners to assess the risks of deploying synthetic genomic data in the wild, and will serve as a benchmark tool for researchers and practitioners in the future.

The availability of genomic data is essential to progress in biomedical research, personalized medicine, etc. However, its extreme sensitivity makes it problematic, if not outright impossible, to publish or share it. As a result, several initiatives have been launched to experiment with synthetic genomic data, e.g., using generative models to learn the underlying distribution of the real data and generate artificial datasets that preserve its salient characteristics without exposing it.This paper provides the first evaluation of both utility and privacy protection of six state-of-the-art models for generating synthetic genomic data. We assess the performance of the synthetic data on several common tasks, such as allele population statistics and linkage disequilibrium. We then measure privacy through the lens of membership inference attacks, i.e., inferring whether a record was part of the training data. Our experiments show that no single approach to generate synthetic genomic data yields both high utility and strong privacy across the board. Also, the size and nature of the training dataset matter. Moreover, while some combinations of datasets and models produce synthetic data with distributions close to the real data, there often are target data points that are vulnerable to membership inference. Looking forward, our techniques can be used by practitioners to assess the risks of deploying synthetic genomic data in the wild and serve as a benchmark for future work.

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