3 research outputs found
Generating tabular datasets under differential privacy
Machine Learning (ML) is accelerating progress across fields and industries,
but relies on accessible and high-quality training data. Some of the most
important datasets are found in biomedical and financial domains in the form of
spreadsheets and relational databases. But this tabular data is often sensitive
in nature. Synthetic data generation offers the potential to unlock sensitive
data, but generative models tend to memorise and regurgitate training data,
which undermines the privacy goal. To remedy this, researchers have
incorporated the mathematical framework of Differential Privacy (DP) into the
training process of deep neural networks. But this creates a trade-off between
the quality and privacy of the resulting data. Generative Adversarial Networks
(GANs) are the dominant paradigm for synthesising tabular data under DP, but
suffer from unstable adversarial training and mode collapse, which are
exacerbated by the privacy constraints and challenging tabular data modality.
This work optimises the quality-privacy trade-off of generative models,
producing higher quality tabular datasets with the same privacy guarantees. We
implement novel end-to-end models that leverage attention mechanisms to learn
reversible tabular representations. We also introduce TableDiffusion, the first
differentially-private diffusion model for tabular data synthesis. Our
experiments show that TableDiffusion produces higher-fidelity synthetic
datasets, avoids the mode collapse problem, and achieves state-of-the-art
performance on privatised tabular data synthesis. By implementing
TableDiffusion to predict the added noise, we enabled it to bypass the
challenges of reconstructing mixed-type tabular data. Overall, the diffusion
paradigm proves vastly more data and privacy efficient than the adversarial
paradigm, due to augmented re-use of each data batch and a smoother iterative
training process
Evaluating warfarin dosing models on multiple datasets with a novel software framework and evolutionary optimisation
Warfarin is an effective preventative treatment for arterial and venous thromboembolism, but requires individualised dosing due to its narrow therapeutic range and high individual variation. Many machine learning techniques have been demonstrated in this domain. This study evaluated the accuracy of the most promising algorithms on the International Warfarin Pharmacogenetics Consortium dataset and a novel clinical dataset of South African patients. Support vectors and linear regression were amongst the top performers in both datasets and performed comparably to recent stacked ensemble approaches, whilst neural networks were one of the worst performers in both datasets. We also introduced genetic programming to automatically optimise model architectures and hyperparameters without human guidance. Remarkably, the generated models were found to match the performance of the best models hand-crafted by human experts. Finally, we present a novel software framework (Warfit-learn) for warfarin dosing research. It leverages the most successful techniques in preprocessing, imputation, and parallel evaluation, with the goal of accelerating research and making results in this domain more reproducible