Scaling While Privacy Preserving: A Comprehensive Synthetic Tabular Data Generation and Evaluation in Learning Analytics

Privacy poses a significant obstacle to the progress of learning analytics (LA), presenting challenges like inadequate anonymization and data misuse that current solutions struggle to address. Synthetic data emerges as a potential remedy, offering robust privacy protection. However, prior LA research on synthetic data lacks thorough evaluation, essential for assessing the delicate balance between privacy and data utility. Synthetic data must not only enhance privacy but also remain practical for data analytics. Moreover, diverse LA scenarios come with varying privacy and utility needs, making the selection of an appropriate synthetic data approach a pressing challenge. To address these gaps, we propose a comprehensive evaluation of synthetic data, which encompasses three dimensions of synthetic data quality, namely resemblance, utility, and privacy. We apply this evaluation to three distinct LA datasets, using three different synthetic data generation methods. Our results show that synthetic data can maintain similar utility (i.e., predictive performance) as real data, while preserving privacy. Furthermore, considering different privacy and data utility requirements in different LA scenarios, we make customized recommendations for synthetic data generation. This paper not only presents a comprehensive evaluation of synthetic data but also illustrates its potential in mitigating privacy concerns within the field of LA, thus contributing to a wider application of synthetic data in LA and promoting a better practice for open science.