3,136 research outputs found

    On the Differential Privacy of Bayesian Inference

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    We study how to communicate findings of Bayesian inference to third parties, while preserving the strong guarantee of differential privacy. Our main contributions are four different algorithms for private Bayesian inference on proba-bilistic graphical models. These include two mechanisms for adding noise to the Bayesian updates, either directly to the posterior parameters, or to their Fourier transform so as to preserve update consistency. We also utilise a recently introduced posterior sampling mechanism, for which we prove bounds for the specific but general case of discrete Bayesian networks; and we introduce a maximum-a-posteriori private mechanism. Our analysis includes utility and privacy bounds, with a novel focus on the influence of graph structure on privacy. Worked examples and experiments with Bayesian na{\"i}ve Bayes and Bayesian linear regression illustrate the application of our mechanisms.Comment: AAAI 2016, Feb 2016, Phoenix, Arizona, United State

    Differentially Private Exponential Random Graphs

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    We propose methods to release and analyze synthetic graphs in order to protect privacy of individual relationships captured by the social network. Proposed techniques aim at fitting and estimating a wide class of exponential random graph models (ERGMs) in a differentially private manner, and thus offer rigorous privacy guarantees. More specifically, we use the randomized response mechanism to release networks under ϵ\epsilon-edge differential privacy. To maintain utility for statistical inference, treating the original graph as missing, we propose a way to use likelihood based inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques to fit ERGMs to the produced synthetic networks. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed techniques on a real data example.Comment: minor edit

    Sharing Social Network Data: Differentially Private Estimation of Exponential-Family Random Graph Models

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    Motivated by a real-life problem of sharing social network data that contain sensitive personal information, we propose a novel approach to release and analyze synthetic graphs in order to protect privacy of individual relationships captured by the social network while maintaining the validity of statistical results. A case study using a version of the Enron e-mail corpus dataset demonstrates the application and usefulness of the proposed techniques in solving the challenging problem of maintaining privacy \emph{and} supporting open access to network data to ensure reproducibility of existing studies and discovering new scientific insights that can be obtained by analyzing such data. We use a simple yet effective randomized response mechanism to generate synthetic networks under ϵ\epsilon-edge differential privacy, and then use likelihood based inference for missing data and Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques to fit exponential-family random graph models to the generated synthetic networks.Comment: Updated, 39 page

    PreFair: Privately Generating Justifiably Fair Synthetic Data

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    When a database is protected by Differential Privacy (DP), its usability is limited in scope. In this scenario, generating a synthetic version of the data that mimics the properties of the private data allows users to perform any operation on the synthetic data, while maintaining the privacy of the original data. Therefore, multiple works have been devoted to devising systems for DP synthetic data generation. However, such systems may preserve or even magnify properties of the data that make it unfair, endering the synthetic data unfit for use. In this work, we present PreFair, a system that allows for DP fair synthetic data generation. PreFair extends the state-of-the-art DP data generation mechanisms by incorporating a causal fairness criterion that ensures fair synthetic data. We adapt the notion of justifiable fairness to fit the synthetic data generation scenario. We further study the problem of generating DP fair synthetic data, showing its intractability and designing algorithms that are optimal under certain assumptions. We also provide an extensive experimental evaluation, showing that PreFair generates synthetic data that is significantly fairer than the data generated by leading DP data generation mechanisms, while remaining faithful to the private data.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figure

    Causal Discovery Under Local Privacy

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    Differential privacy is a widely adopted framework designed to safeguard the sensitive information of data providers within a data set. It is based on the application of controlled noise at the interface between the server that stores and processes the data, and the data consumers. Local differential privacy is a variant that allows data providers to apply the privatization mechanism themselves on their data individually. Therefore it provides protection also in contexts in which the server, or even the data collector, cannot be trusted. The introduction of noise, however, inevitably affects the utility of the data, particularly by distorting the correlations between individual data components. This distortion can prove detrimental to tasks such as causal discovery. In this paper, we consider various well-known locally differentially private mechanisms and compare the trade-off between the privacy they provide, and the accuracy of the causal structure produced by algorithms for causal learning when applied to data obfuscated by these mechanisms. Our analysis yields valuable insights for selecting appropriate local differentially private protocols for causal discovery tasks. We foresee that our findings will aid researchers and practitioners in conducting locally private causal discovery
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