Privately Estimating Graph Parameters in Sublinear Time

Jeremiah Blocki, Elena Grigorescu, Tamalika Mukherjee

Abstract: We initiate a systematic study of algorithms that are both differentially-private and run in sublinear time for several problems in which the goal is to estimate natural graph parameters. Our main result is a differentially-private (1+ρ)-approximation algorithm for the problem of computing the average degree of a graph, for every ρ > 0. The running time of the algorithm is roughly the same (for sparse graphs) as its non-private version proposed by Goldreich and Ron (Sublinear Algorithms, 2005). We also obtain the first differentially-private sublinear-time approximation algorithms for the maximum matching size and the minimum vertex cover size of a graph. An overarching technique we employ is the notion of coupled global sensitivity of randomized algorithms. Related variants of this notion of sensitivity have been used in the literature in ad-hoc ways. Here we formalize the notion and develop it as a unifying framework for privacy analysis of randomized approximation algorithms.