Mechanisms for generating differentially private synthetic data based on marginals and graphical models have been successful in a wide range of settings. However, one limitation of these methods is their inability to incorporate public data. Initializing a data generating model by pre-training on public data has shown to improve the quality of synthetic data, but this technique is not applicable when model structure is not determined a priori. We develop the mechanism jam-pgm, which expands the adaptive measurements framework to jointly select between measuring public data and private data. This technique allows for public data to be included in a graphical-model-based mechanism. We show that jam-pgm is able to outperform both publicly assisted and non publicly assisted synthetic data generation mechanisms even when the public data distribution is biased.
In this work, we study properties of texts from the perspective of complex network theory. Words in given texts are linked by co-occurrence and transformed into networks, and we observe that these display topological properties common to other complex systems. However, there are some properties that seem to be exclusive to texts; many of these properties depend on the frequency of words in the text, while others seem to be strictly determined by the grammar. Precisely, these properties allow for a categorization of texts as either with a sense and others encoded or senseless.