Presidio-research

This package provides evaluation and data-science capabilities for Presidio and PII detection models in general.

It also includes a fake data generator that creates synthetic sentences based on templates and fake PII.

Who should use it?

• Anyone interested in developing or evaluating PII detection models, an existing Presidio instance or a Presidio PII recognizer.
• Anyone interested in generating new data based on previous datasets or sentence templates (e.g., to increase the coverage of entity values) for Named Entity Recognition models.

Getting started

Using notebooks

The easiest way to get started is by reviewing the notebooks.

• Notebook 1: Shows how to use the PII data generator.
• Notebook 2: Shows a simple analysis of the PII dataset.
• Notebook 3: Provides tools to split the dataset into train/test/validation sets while avoiding leakage due to the same pattern appearing in multiple folds (only applicable for synthetically generated data).
• Notebook 4: Shows how to use the evaluation tools to evaluate how well Presidio detects PII. Note that this is using the vanilla Presidio, and the results aren't very accurate.
• Notebook 5: Shows how one can configure Presidio to detect PII much more accurately, and boost the f score in ~30%.
• Notebook 6: Explains the entity mapping process, which is crucial when evaluating multiple models each returning a different set of entities.

Installation

From PyPI

pip install presidio-evaluator
python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm # for tokenization
python -m spacy download en_core_web_lg # for NER

From source

To install the package:

1. Clone the repo
2. Install all dependencies:

# Install uv if not already installed
pip install uv

# Install package + dev dependencies
uv sync --extra dev

# Download the spaCy pipeline used for tokenization
uv run python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm

# To use the default Presidio configuration, a spaCy model is required:
uv run python -m spacy download en_core_web_lg

# Verify installation
uv run pytest

Note that some dependencies (such as Flair and Stanza) are no longer supported. Use Presidio Analyzer directly to add custom NER models.

What's in this package?

1. Fake data generator for PII recognizers and NER models
2. Data representation layer for data generation, modeling and analysis
3. Model/Recognizer evaluation for Presidio Analyzer and custom Presidio recognizers
4. Helper functions for results analysis

1. Data generation

See Data Generator README for more details.

The data generation process takes a file with templates, e.g. My name is {{name}}. Then, it creates new synthetic sentences by sampling templates and PII values. Furthermore, it tokenizes the data, creates tags (either IO/BIO/BILUO) and spans for the newly created samples.

• For information on data generation/augmentation, see the data generator README.
• For an example for running the generation process, see this notebook.
• For an understanding of the underlying fake PII data used, see this exploratory data analysis notebook.

Once data is generated, it could be split into train/test/validation sets while ensuring that each template only exists in one set. See this notebook for more details.

2. Data representation

In order to standardize the process, we use specific data objects that hold all the information needed for generating, analyzing, modeling and evaluating data and models. Specifically, see data_objects.py.

The standardized structure, List[InputSample], can be translated into different formats:

• CoNLL

  • To CoNLL:

    from presidio_evaluator import InputSample
    dataset = InputSample.read_dataset_json("data/synth_dataset_v2.json")
    conll = InputSample.create_conll_dataset(dataset)
    conll.to_csv("dataset.csv", sep="\t")
    

  • From CoNLL

    from pathlib import Path
    from presidio_evaluator.dataset_formatters import CONLL2003Formatter
    # Read from a folder containing ConLL2003 files
    conll_formatter = CONLL2003Formatter(files_path=Path("data/conll2003").resolve())
    train_samples = conll_formatter.to_input_samples(fold="train")
    

• spaCy v3

  from presidio_evaluator import InputSample
  dataset = InputSample.read_dataset_json("data/synth_dataset_v2.json")
  InputSample.create_spacy_dataset(dataset, output_path="dataset.spacy")
  

• json

  from presidio_evaluator import InputSample
  dataset = InputSample.read_dataset_json("data/synth_dataset_v2.json")
  InputSample.to_json(dataset, output_file="dataset_json")
  

3. PII models evaluation

The presidio-evaluator framework allows you to evaluate Presidio as a system, a NER model, or a specific PII recognizer for precision, recall, and error analysis. See Notebook 5 for an example.

For more information

• Blog post on PII evaluation
• Blog post on NLP approaches to data anonymization
• How to evaluate PII Detection output with Presidio Evaluator
• Conference talk about leveraging Presidio and utilizing NLP approaches for data anonymization

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Open an issue to discuss larger changes before submitting a pull request.

This project has adopted the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to presidio@dataprivacystack.org.

Copyright notice:

Fake Name Generator identities by the Fake Name Generator are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Fake Name Generator and the Fake Name Generator logo are trademarks of Corban Works, LLC.