Injecting Uncertainty in Graphs for Identity Obfuscation

Data collected nowadays by social-networking applications create fascinating opportunities for building novel services, as well as expanding our understanding about social structures and their dynamics. Unfortunately, publishing social-network graphs is considered an ill-advised practice due to privacy concerns. To alleviate this problem, several anonymization methods have been proposed, aiming at reducing the risk of a privacy breach on the published data, while still allowing to analyze them and draw relevant conclusions. In this paper we introduce a new anonymization approach that is based on injecting uncertainty in social graphs and publishing the resulting uncertain graphs. While existing approaches obfuscate graph data by adding or removing edges entirely, we propose using a finer-grained perturbation that adds or removes edges partially: this way we can achieve the same desired level of obfuscation with smaller changes in the data, thus maintaining higher utility. Our experiments on real-world networks confirm that at the same level of identity obfuscation our method provides higher usefulness than existing randomized methods that publish standard graphs.Comment: VLDB201

Node Classification in Uncertain Graphs

In many real applications that use and analyze networked data, the links in the network graph may be erroneous, or derived from probabilistic techniques. In such cases, the node classification problem can be challenging, since the unreliability of the links may affect the final results of the classification process. If the information about link reliability is not used explicitly, the classification accuracy in the underlying network may be affected adversely. In this paper, we focus on situations that require the analysis of the uncertainty that is present in the graph structure. We study the novel problem of node classification in uncertain graphs, by treating uncertainty as a first-class citizen. We propose two techniques based on a Bayes model and automatic parameter selection, and show that the incorporation of uncertainty in the classification process as a first-class citizen is beneficial. We experimentally evaluate the proposed approach using different real data sets, and study the behavior of the algorithms under different conditions. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach

Anonymizing Social Graphs via Uncertainty Semantics

Rather than anonymizing social graphs by generalizing them to super nodes/edges or adding/removing nodes and edges to satisfy given privacy parameters, recent methods exploit the semantics of uncertain graphs to achieve privacy protection of participating entities and their relationship. These techniques anonymize a deterministic graph by converting it into an uncertain form. In this paper, we propose a generalized obfuscation model based on uncertain adjacency matrices that keep expected node degrees equal to those in the unanonymized graph. We analyze two recently proposed schemes and show their fitting into the model. We also point out disadvantages in each method and present several elegant techniques to fill the gap between them. Finally, to support fair comparisons, we develop a new tradeoff quantifying framework by leveraging the concept of incorrectness in location privacy research. Experiments on large social graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of our schemes

Risk-Averse Matchings over Uncertain Graph Databases

A large number of applications such as querying sensor networks, and analyzing protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks, rely on mining uncertain graph and hypergraph databases. In this work we study the following problem: given an uncertain, weighted (hyper)graph, how can we efficiently find a (hyper)matching with high expected reward, and low risk? This problem naturally arises in the context of several important applications, such as online dating, kidney exchanges, and team formation. We introduce a novel formulation for finding matchings with maximum expected reward and bounded risk under a general model of uncertain weighted (hyper)graphs that we introduce in this work. Our model generalizes probabilistic models used in prior work, and captures both continuous and discrete probability distributions, thus allowing to handle privacy related applications that inject appropriately distributed noise to (hyper)edge weights. Given that our optimization problem is NP-hard, we turn our attention to designing efficient approximation algorithms. For the case of uncertain weighted graphs, we provide a $\frac{1}{3}$-approximation algorithm, and a $\frac{1}{5}$-approximation algorithm with near optimal run time. For the case of uncertain weighted hypergraphs, we provide a $\Omega(\frac{1}{k})$-approximation algorithm, where $k$ is the rank of the hypergraph (i.e., any hyperedge includes at most $k$ nodes), that runs in almost (modulo log factors) linear time. We complement our theoretical results by testing our approximation algorithms on a wide variety of synthetic experiments, where we observe in a controlled setting interesting findings on the trade-off between reward, and risk. We also provide an application of our formulation for providing recommendations of teams that are likely to collaborate, and have high impact.Comment: 25 page

Mining Maximal Cliques from an Uncertain Graph

We consider mining dense substructures (maximal cliques) from an uncertain graph, which is a probability distribution on a set of deterministic graphs. For parameter 0 < {\alpha} < 1, we present a precise definition of an {\alpha}-maximal clique in an uncertain graph. We present matching upper and lower bounds on the number of {\alpha}-maximal cliques possible within an uncertain graph. We present an algorithm to enumerate {\alpha}-maximal cliques in an uncertain graph whose worst-case runtime is near-optimal, and an experimental evaluation showing the practical utility of the algorithm.Comment: ICDE 201

Feature-rich networks: going beyond complex network topologies.

Abstract The growing availability of multirelational data gives rise to an opportunity for novel characterization of complex real-world relations, supporting the proliferation of diverse network models such as Attributed Graphs, Heterogeneous Networks, Multilayer Networks, Temporal Networks, Location-aware Networks, Knowledge Networks, Probabilistic Networks, and many other task-driven and data-driven models. In this paper, we propose an overview of these models and their main applications, described under the common denomination of Feature-rich Networks, i. e. models where the expressive power of the network topology is enhanced by exposing one or more peculiar features. The aim is also to sketch a scenario that can inspire the design of novel feature-rich network models, which in turn can support innovative methods able to exploit the full potential of mining complex network structures in domain-specific applications

Conditional Reliability in Uncertain Graphs

Network reliability is a well-studied problem that requires to measure the probability that a target node is reachable from a source node in a probabilistic (or uncertain) graph, i.e., a graph where every edge is assigned a probability of existence. Many approaches and problem variants have been considered in the literature, all assuming that edge-existence probabilities are fixed. Nevertheless, in real-world graphs, edge probabilities typically depend on external conditions. In metabolic networks a protein can be converted into another protein with some probability depending on the presence of certain enzymes. In social influence networks the probability that a tweet of some user will be re-tweeted by her followers depends on whether the tweet contains specific hashtags. In transportation networks the probability that a network segment will work properly or not might depend on external conditions such as weather or time of the day. In this paper we overcome this limitation and focus on conditional reliability, that is assessing reliability when edge-existence probabilities depend on a set of conditions. In particular, we study the problem of determining the k conditions that maximize the reliability between two nodes. We deeply characterize our problem and show that, even employing polynomial-time reliability-estimation methods, it is NP-hard, does not admit any PTAS, and the underlying objective function is non-submodular. We then devise a practical method that targets both accuracy and efficiency. We also study natural generalizations of the problem with multiple source and target nodes. An extensive empirical evaluation on several large, real-life graphs demonstrates effectiveness and scalability of the proposed methods.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figure