Mining Frequent Graph Patterns with Differential Privacy

TL;DR

This paper introduces the first differentially private algorithm for mining frequent graph patterns, addressing privacy concerns in sensitive graph data and utilizing MCMC sampling to ensure privacy and utility.

Contribution

It presents a novel MCMC-based differentially private algorithm for graph pattern mining, overcoming limitations of previous itemset-based methods.

Findings

Algorithm achieves good precision in frequent pattern discovery.

Provides formal privacy and utility guarantees.

Efficient neighboring pattern counting technique developed.

Abstract

Discovering frequent graph patterns in a graph database offers valuable information in a variety of applications. However, if the graph dataset contains sensitive data of individuals such as mobile phone-call graphs and web-click graphs, releasing discovered frequent patterns may present a threat to the privacy of individuals. {\em Differential privacy} has recently emerged as the {\em de facto} standard for private data analysis due to its provable privacy guarantee. In this paper we propose the first differentially private algorithm for mining frequent graph patterns. We first show that previous techniques on differentially private discovery of frequent {\em itemsets} cannot apply in mining frequent graph patterns due to the inherent complexity of handling structural information in graphs. We then address this challenge by proposing a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling based algorithm. Unlike previous work on frequent itemset mining, our techniques do not rely on the output of a non-private mining algorithm. Instead, we observe that both frequent graph pattern mining and the guarantee of differential privacy can be unified into an MCMC sampling framework. In addition, we establish the privacy and utility guarantee of our algorithm and propose an efficient neighboring pattern counting technique as well. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is able to output frequent patterns with good precision.