Abstract
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.
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Karwa, V., Slavković, A.B., Krivitsky, P. (2014). Differentially Private Exponential Random Graphs. In: Domingo-Ferrer, J. (eds) Privacy in Statistical Databases. PSD 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8744. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11257-2_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11257-2_12
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