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-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
