Title
Local Differential Private Data Aggregation for Discrete Distribution Estimation
Abstract
For the purpose of improving the quality of services, softwares or online services are collecting various of user data, such as personal information and locations. Such data facilitates mining statistical knowledge of users, but threatens users’ privacy as it may reveal sensitive information (e.g., identities and activities) about individuals. This work considers distribution estimation over user-contributed data meanwhile providing rigid protection of their data with local $\epsilon$ε-differential privacy ($\epsilon$ε-LDP), which sanitizes each user's data on the client's side (e.g, on the user's mobile device). Our privacy protection covers both qualitative data (e.g., categorical data) and discrete quantitative data (e.g., location data). Specifically, for categorical data, we derive an optimal $\epsilon$ε-LDP mechanism (termed as $k$k-subset mechanism) from mutual information perspective, and further show its optimality over existing approaches within the context of discrete distribution estimation; for discrete quantitative data that have arbitrary distance metric, we provide an efficient extension of $k$k-subset mechanism by proposing a variant of the popular Exponential Mechanism (EM) to tackle the asymmetry issue on the data domain. Experiments on real-world datasets and simulated scenarios show that our mechanism is highly efficient and reduces nearly a fraction of $\exp (-\frac{\epsilon }{2})$exp(-ε2) error for distribution estimation when compared to existing approaches.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/tpds.2019.2899097
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Estimation,Data models,Mutual information,Servers,Privacy,Differential privacy
Data modeling,Data domain,Differential privacy,Categorical variable,Computer science,Metric (mathematics),Theoretical computer science,Probability distribution,Mutual information,Data aggregator,Distributed computing
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
30
9
1045-9219
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
0.43
0
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shaowei Wang1111985.65
Liusheng Huang247364.55
yiwen nie3122.93
Xinyuan Zhang461.10
Pengzhan Wang5285.53
Hongli Xu650285.92
Wei Yang728654.48