Privacy is an important concern for our society where sharing data with
partners or releasing data to the public is a frequent occurrence. Some of the
techniques that are being used to achieve privacy are to remove identifiers,
alter quasi-identifiers, and perturb values. Unfortunately, these approaches
suffer from two limitations. First, it has been shown that private information
can still be leaked if attackers possess some background knowledge or other
information sources. Second, they do not take into account the adverse impact
these methods will have on the utility of the released data. In this paper, we
propose a method that meets both requirements. Our method, called table-GAN,
uses generative adversarial networks (GANs) to synthesize fake tables that are
statistically similar to the original table yet do not incur information
leakage. We show that the machine learning models trained using our synthetic
tables exhibit performance that is similar to that of models trained using the
original table for unknown testing cases. We call this property model
compatibility. We believe that anonymization/perturbation/synthesis methods
without model compatibility are of little value. We used four real-world
datasets from four different domains for our experiments and conducted in-depth
comparisons with state-of-the-art anonymization, perturbation, and generation
techniques. Throughout our experiments, only our method consistently shows a
balance between privacy level and model compatibility.