Differentially private synthesis of Spatial Point Processes

Abstract: This paper proposes a method to generate synthetic data for spatial point patterns within the differential privacy (DP) framework. Specifically, we define a differentially private Poisson point synthesizer (PPS) and Cox point synthesizer (CPS) to generate synthetic point patterns with the concept of the $\alpha$-neighborhood that relaxes the original definition of DP. We present three example models to construct a differentially private PPS and CPS, providing sufficient conditions on their parameters to ensure the DP given a specified privacy budget. In addition, we demonstrate that the synthesizers can be applied to point patterns on the linear network. Simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed approaches effectively maintain the privacy and utility of synthetic data.