GlucoSynth: Generating Differentially-Private Synthetic Glucose Traces

Abstract: We focus on the problem of generating high-quality, private synthetic glucose traces, a task generalizable to many other time series sources. Existing methods for time series data synthesis, such as those using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), are not able to capture the innate characteristics of glucose data and cannot provide any formal privacy guarantees without severely degrading the utility of the synthetic data. In this paper we present GlucoSynth, a novel privacy-preserving GAN framework to generate synthetic glucose traces. The core intuition behind our approach is to conserve relationships amongst motifs (glucose events) within the traces, in addition to temporal dynamics. Our framework incorporates differential privacy mechanisms to provide strong formal privacy guarantees. We provide a comprehensive evaluation on the real-world utility of the data using 1.2 million glucose traces; GlucoSynth outperforms all previous methods in its ability to generate high-quality synthetic glucose traces with strong privacy guarantees.