DP-UserPro: differentially private user profile construction and publication

User profiles are widely used in the age of big data. However, generating and releasing user profiles may cause serious privacy leakage, since a large number of personal data are collected and analyzed. In this paper, we propose a differentially private user profile construction method DP-UserPro, which is composed of DP-CLIQUE and privately top-k tags selection. DP-CLIQUE is a differentially private high dimensional data cluster algorithm based on CLIQUE. The multidimensional tag space is divided into cells, Laplace noises are added into the count value of each cell. Based on the breadth-first-search, the largest connected dense cells are clustered into a cluster. Then a privately top-k tags selection approach is proposed based on the score function of each tag, to select the most important k tags which can represent the characteristics of the cluster. Privacy and utility of DP-UserPro are theoretically analyzed and experimentally evaluated in the last. Comparison experiments are carried out with Tag Suppression algorithm on two real datasets, to measure the False Negative Rate (FNR) and precision. The results show that DP-UserPro outperforms Tag Suppression by 62.5% in the best case and 14.25% in the worst case on FNR, and DP-UserPro is about 21.1% better on precision than that of Tag Suppression, in average.

Automated summary

In this paper, a differentially private user profile construction method DP-UserPro is proposed, which consists of DP-CLIQUE and privately top-k tags selection. The privacy and utility of DP-UserPro are theoretically analyzed and experimentally evaluated, showing better performance on FNR and precision compared to the Tag Suppression algorithm.