Secure Network Release with Link Privacy

Carl Yang, Haonan Wang, Ke ZHANG, Lichao Sun

Keywords: generative model, graph neural network, data release

Abstract: Many data mining and analytical tasks rely on the abstraction of networks (graphs) to summarize relational structures among individuals (nodes). Since relational data are often sensitive, we aim to seek effective approaches to release utility-preserved yet privacy-protected structured data. In this paper, we leverage the differential privacy (DP) framework, to formulate and enforce rigorous privacy constraints on deep graph generation models, with a focus on edge-DP to guarantee individual link privacy. In particular, we enforce edge-DP by injecting Gaussian noise to the gradients of a link reconstruction based graph generation model, and ensure data utility by improving structure learning with structure-oriented graph comparison. Extensive experiments on two real-world network datasets show that our proposed DPGGAN model is able to generate networks with effectively preserved global structure and rigorously protected individual link privacy.

One-sentence Summary: We study secure network release by learning to generate globally useful graphs with individual link privacy.

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