Differentially Private Attributed Network Releasing Based on Early Fusion

• Main Authors: Yuye Wang, Jing Yang, Jianpei Zhan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hindawi-Wiley 2021-01-01
• Series: Security and Communication Networks
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2021/9981752

Vertex attributes exert huge impacts on the analysis of social networks. Since the attributes are often sensitive, it is necessary to seek effective ways to protect the privacy of graphs with correlated attributes. Prior work has focused mainly on the graph topological structure and the attributes, respectively, and combining them together by defining the relevancy between them. However, these methods need to add noise to them, respectively, and they produce a large number of required noise and reduce the data utility. In this paper, we introduce an approach to release graphs with correlated attributes under differential privacy based on early fusion. We combine the graph topological structure and the attributes together with a private probability model and generate a synthetic network satisfying differential privacy. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that our approach could meet the request of attributed networks and achieve high data utility.