# Differentially Private Release of Israel's National Registry of Live Births

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00267 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00267/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

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- [Fingerprinting Codes Meet Geometry: Improved Lower Bounds for Private Query Release and Adaptive Data Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14396/) (2024)
- [dpmm: Differentially Private Marginal Models, a Library for Synthetic Tabular Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00322/) (2025)
- [Privacy without Noisy Gradients: Slicing Mechanism for Generative Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19941/) (2024)
- [A Unified Framework for Adversary-Aware Differential Privacy Bounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08158/) (2025)
- [Differentially Private Wasserstein Barycenters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03021/) (2025)
- [Synthetic Data, Similarity-based Privacy Metrics, and Regulatory (Non-)Compliance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16929/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Anonymity Claims in Synthetic Data Generation: A Model-Centric Privacy Attack Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22434/) (2026)
- [Privacy-Computation trade-offs in Private Repetition and Metaselection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19012/) (2024)
- [Understanding the Impact of Data Domain Extraction on Synthetic Data Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08254/) (2025)
- [Private Continuous-Time Synthetic Trajectory Generation via Mean-Field Langevin Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12203/) (2025)
- [From Easy to Hard++: Promoting Differentially Private Image Synthesis Through Spatial-Frequency Curriculum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06368/) (2026)
- [Should I use Synthetic Data for That? An Analysis of the Suitability of Synthetic Data for Data Sharing and Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03791/) (2026)
- [Differentially Private Modeling of Disease Transmission within Human Contact Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07493/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In February 2024, Israel's Ministry of Health released microdata of live births in Israel in 2014. The dataset is based on Israel's National Registry of Live Births and offers substantial value in multiple areas, such as scientific research and policy-making, while providing pure differential privacy guarantee with varepsilon = 9.98 for 2014's mothers and newborns. The release was co-designed by the authors along with stakeholders from both inside and outside the Ministry of Health. This paper presents the methodology used to obtain that release, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first of its kind in the world. The design process has been challenging and required flexibility and open-mindedness on all sides involved, along with substantial technical innovation. In particular, we introduce new concepts regarding the desiderata from dataset releases in a microdata format, as well as a way to bundle together multiple quantitative desiderata for a differentially private release using the private selection algorithm of Liu and Talwar (STOC 2019). We hope that the experiences reported here will be useful to future differentially private releases.