On the Fidelity-Privacy Tradeoff of Synthetic Cancer Registry Data

The sharing of personal health data is highly regulated due to privacy and security concerns. An alternative to sharing personal data is to share synthetic data, because ideally it should be impossible to reconstruct real personal data from synthetic data, which is called privacy. At the same time, the structure of the synthetic data should be as similar as possible to the structure of the real data to ensure that conclusions drawn from the synthetic data are also valid for the real data, which is called fidelity. Typically, there is a tradeoff between fidelity and privacy for synthetic health data. We study the fidelity and privacy of cancer data synthesized using generative machine learning approaches. To generate synthetic cancer data, we use variational autoencoders (VAEs), generative adversarial networks (GANs), and denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs). The tabular cancer registry data studied have nine categorical variables from breast cancer patients. We find that DDPMs generate synthetic cancer data with higher fidelity; that is, the structure of the synthetic data is more similar to the real cancer data than the data generated by VAEs and GANs. At the same time, synthetic cancer data from DDPMs pose a greater privacy risk because the data are more likely to reveal information from real patients than synthetic data from VAEs and GANs.