Kung Faux Pandas: Simplifying privacy protection
King, J., Russell, S., Bennett, T. D., & Ghosh, D. (2019). Kung Faux Pandas Simplifying privacy protection. AMIA Summits on Translational Science Proceedings, 2019, 267. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6568075
There are many barriers to data access and data sharing, especially in the domain of machine learning on health care data. Legal constraints such as HIPAA protect patient privacy but slow access to data and limit reproducibility. This repository contains an end-to-end system called Kung Faux Pandas for easily generating de-identified or synthetic data which is statistically similar to given real data but lacks sensitive information. This system focuses on data synthesis and de-identification narrowed to a specific research question to allow for self-service data access without the complexities required to generate an entire population of data that is not needed for a given research project. Kung Faux Pandas is an open source publicly available system that lowers barriers to HIPAA- and GDPR-compliant data sharing for enabling reproducibility and other purposes.
This data synthesis process was created using Python. In order to make it easier for others to replicate the environment, a range of environments are supported: Conda environment export, virtualenv requirements file, and a docker image with the latest code.
Python Setup
To run the software, download/clone this repository and then run the appropriate command below based on your Python distribution:
Conda users
From the base directory of the repository:
cd sourcecode/python/
conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate kungfauxpandas
Note: Windows users may need to install Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools/Build Tools for Visual Studio in order to sucessfully build and install all packages in the environment. Tools are available for free at https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/visual-cpp-build-tools/
Virtualenv users
From the base directory of the repository:
cd sourcecode/python/
virtualenv kungfauxpandas
source kungfauxpandas/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
For macOS users, you may see errors with a message like "Python is not installed as a framework. The Mac OS X backend will not be able to function correctly if Python is not installed as a framework..." If you have this problem, see Stack Overflow posts matplotlib: RuntimeError: Python is not installed as a framework or Unable to “import matplotlib.pyplot as plt” in virtualenv for solutions.
Install plugin(s)
This software provides a method for adding new plugins for data synthesis. The only method fully included with this repository is a kernel density estimation method based on scipy's gaussian KDE (see scipy.stats.gaussian_kde). We have developed plugins for DataSynthesis and are currently working on one for Synthetic dataset Generation Framework. In order to use a plugin, you must download additional software.
DataSynthesizer
To make sure you get the version compatible and tested with Kung Faux Pandas, you can either download a zip at the specific commit, or use git and checkout the correct commit. For both steps, start from the base directory of the repository:
Download zip file
cd plugins/
wget https://github.com/DataResponsibly/DataSynthesizer/archive/0bae2c18a3d6998e2f370fbf2fb816bebb8b0abc.zip
unzip 0bae2c18a3d6998e2f370fbf2fb816bebb8b0abc.zip
mv DataSynthesizer-0bae2c18a3d6998e2f370fbf2fb816bebb8b0abc/ DataSynthesizer/
Git clone with specific commit
cd plugins/
git clone https://github.com/DataResponsibly/DataSynthesizer.git
cd DataSynthesizer
git checkout 0bae2c1
Some of the DataSynthesizer examples may require installation of additional software or Python libraries.
For example, Django is required for some of the webUI items. Install with:
conda install django
or
pip install django
Running the software
Currently two methods are provided - a web interface (utilizing a REST API) or Python class
Web UI/API
Start a web server:
From the base directory of the repository:
cd sourcecode/html
python -m http.server 8080
Start the Hug REST API server
From the base directory of the repository:
cd sourcecode/python
hug -p 8000 -f web_service.py
For those interested in how we created the Conda or virtualenv files:
To save conda env
From the base directory of the repository:
cd sourcecode/python/
conda create -n kungfauxpandas python=3.9
conda activate kungfauxpandas
conda install chardet cython jupyter matplotlib numpy pandas psycopg2 pytest scikit-learn scipy seaborn sqlparse statsmodels
pip install hug
conda env export -n kungfauxpandas | grep -v "^prefix: " > environment.yml
Note, the resulting environment.yml file will include files specified above as well as all dependencies, so will include much more than just the package list above.
Steps to create the virtualenv
From the base directory of the repository:
cd sourcecode/python/
virtualenv kungfauxpandas
source kungfauxpandas/bin/activate
pip install chardet cython hug jupyter matplotlib numpy pandas psycopg2 pytest scikit-learn scipy seaborn sqlparse statsmodels
pip list --format=freeze > requirements.txt
Note, the resulting requirements.txt file will include files specified above as well as all dependencies, so will include much more than just the package list above.
Docker Notes
Using the provided docker image
Use the provided docker image by executing the following:
docker pull blackspot/synthesis
docker run -p 8000:8000 -p 8080:8080 -it blackspot/synthesis
Then point your browser to http://localhost:8080
User your own data with the docker image
The provided docker container has a sample data set generated using test_data_generator.ipynb
If you want to use the docker container with your own data, there are a couple of options:
-
Save your data into a SQLite database and copy into the container. To do this, first stop the running container (Ctrl-C if in the foreground in your terminal) then execute the following:
docker cp <mysqlite.db> <container name or id>:/app/kungfauxpandas-master/data/sample_data.dbReplace <mysqlite.db> with your actual SQLite database file, and replace with the name or ID of your container (
docker ps -ato see all your containers). Then start the container withdocker start <container name or id> -
Upload new data via the Web UI. By clicking the "Import Data" button in the upper right of the screen, a dialog is presented by which you can upload CSV files to the database. The new table will be named the same as the file uploaded (minus .csv if the file ends in .csv).
-
Adjust web_service.py and change the database connection from the provided sample SQLite database, or use the KFP Python API directly.
How to rebuild the docker image
Clone the git repo and from the base of the repo run the following:
cd sourcecode/scripts
docker build -t kungfauxpandas .
If you want to run the docker image you just created:
docker run -p 8000:8000 -p 8080:8080 -it kungfauxpandas
How we make the docker image available via dockerhub
docker login --username=blackspot
docker images
# find image id and replace <imageid> with the actual id
docker tag <imageid> blackspot/synthesis:latest
docker push blackspot/synthesis:latest
Unit Testing
pytest is used for the unit tests for the Python components of this software.
To run unit tests, checkout the repository, install dependencies, and do the following from the base of the repo:
cd sourceode/python
pytest
OS Specific Requirements
All OSes require a compiler to be installed first - if you already can build and install Python libraries you are already setup.
On Ubunut 18.04 LTS, some system libraries must be installed before you can install and build the required Python libraries.
sudo apt-get install libatlas-base-dev