Privacy-Preserving Link Prediction in Multiple Private Networks

Haifeng Zhang, Xiao-Jing Ma, Jing Wang, Xingyi Zhang, Donghui Pan, Kai Zhong

Abstract: In many cases, a network may be dispersedly recorded by different participants and each participant is one part of the original network, and no one is willing to share its data due to commercial competition. Therefore, each participant forms an independent private network, and they form a “ multiple private networks” regarding the original network. Existing methods only use the structure of private network itself to predict missing links, leading to underutilized information and deteriorated prediction accuracy. One natural question arises: how to integrate the information of multiple private networks by formulating a security protocol, so as to help each private network to better predict missing links in its own network without disclosing its structure to others. To this end, we propose an SMPC-LP method based on secure multiparty computation (SMPC) to solve this problem. The method fuses the information of each private network without disclosing their inputs, and then, the similarity score of each node pair is jointly calculated, achieving enhanced link prediction performance in each private network. The experimental results show that the SMPC-LP method can better predict the missing links than the methods only using the information of the one private network, without violating data privacy agreement.