Synthetic Data for Social Good
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Data for good implies unfettered access to data. But data owners must be conservative about how, when, and why they share data or risk violating the trust of the people they aim to help, losing their funding, or breaking the law. Data sharing agreements can help prevent privacy violations, but require a level of specificity that is premature during preliminary discussions, and can take over a year to establish. We consider the generation and use of synthetic data to facilitate ad hoc collaborations involving sensitive data. A good synthetic dataset has two properties: it is representative of the original data, and it provides strong guarantees about privacy. In this paper, we discuss important use cases for synthetic data that challenge the state of the art in privacy-preserving data generation, and describe DataSynthesizer, a dataset generation tool that takes a sensitive dataset as input and generates a structurally and statistically similar synthetic dataset, with strong privacy guarantees, as output. The data owners need not release their data, while potential collaborators can begin developing models and methods with some confidence that their results will work similarly on the real dataset. The distinguishing feature of DataSynthesizer is its usability - in most cases, the data owner need not specify any parameters to start generating and sharing data safely and effectively. The code implementing DataSynthesizer is publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/DataResponsibly. The work on DataSynthesizer is part of the Data, Responsibly project, where the goal is to operationalize responsibility in data sharing, integration, analysis and use.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".