Differentially Private Event Histogram Publication on Sequences over Graphs

The big data era is coming with strong and ever-growing demands on analyzing personal information and footprints in the cyber world. To enable such analysis without privacy leak risk, differential privacy (DP) is quickly rising in recent years, as the first practical privacy protection model with rigorous theoretical guarantee. This paper discusses how to publish differentially private histograms on events in time series domain, with sequences of personal events over graphs with events as edges. Such individual-generated sequences commonly appear in formalized industrial workflows, online game logs and spatial-temporal trajectories, the direct publication of which may compromise personal privacy. While existing DP mechanisms mainly target at normalized domains with fixed and aligned dimensions, our problem raises new challenges when the sequences could follow arbitrary paths on the graph. To tackle the problem, we reformulate the problem with a three-step framework, which 1) carefully truncates the original sequences, trading off errors introduced by the truncation with those introduced by the noise added to guarantee privacy, 2) decomposes the event graph into path sub-domains based on the given query workload, and 3) employs a deeply optimized tree-based histogram construction approach for each sub-domain to benefit with less noise addition. We present a careful analysis on our framework to support thorough optimizations over each step of the framework, and verify the huge improvements of our proposals over state-of-the-art solutions.