Stateful Switch: Optimized Time Series Release with Local Differential Privacy

TL;DR

This paper introduces StaSwitch, a stateful mechanism for releasing time series data with local differential privacy, reducing utility loss and increasing flexibility compared to existing perturbation methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel stateful switch operation for temporal perturbation, improving utility and privacy flexibility in time series data release under TLDP.

Findings

StaSwitch outperforms existing mechanisms in utility.

It allows flexible privacy budget configurations.

It reduces issues of missing or repeated values.

Abstract

Time series data have numerous applications in big data analytics. However, they often cause privacy issues when collected from individuals. To address this problem, most existing works perturb the values in the time series while retaining their temporal order, which may lead to significant distortion of the values. Recently, we propose TLDP model that perturbs temporal perturbation to ensure privacy guarantee while retaining original values. It has shown great promise to achieve significantly higher utility than value perturbation mechanisms in many time series analysis. However, its practicability is still undermined by two factors, namely, utility cost of extra missing or empty values, and inflexibility of privacy budget settings. To address them, in this paper we propose {\it switch} as a new two-way operation for temporal perturbation, as opposed to the one-way {\it dispatch} operation. The former inherently eliminates the cost of missing, empty or repeated values. Optimizing switch operation in a {\it stateful} manner, we then propose $StaSwitch$ mechanism for time series release under TLDP. Through both analytical and empirical studies, we show that $StaSwitch$ has significantly higher utility for the published time series than any state-of-the-art temporal- or value-perturbation mechanism, while allowing any combination of privacy budget settings.