Differential Privacy for Network Assortativity
Fei Ma, Jinzhi Ouyang, Xincheng Hu
TL;DR
This work tackles the privacy-sensitive problem of estimating network assortativity. It introduces three differential privacy schemes—Local_{ru}, Shuffle_{ru}, and Decentral_{ru}—to produce unbiased estimates of the assortativity factor under varying local information settings, with Shuffle_{ru} delivering the strongest utility due to privacy amplification. The authors provide formal DP guarantees, unbiasedness proofs, and MSE analyses, complemented by extensive experiments on synthetic and real networks that validate the theoretical results. The study demonstrates that broader local views (DDP) and shuffling significantly improve accuracy in sparse networks, offering practical pathways for privacy-preserving network analysis. These contributions advance privacy-aware structural analysis and have implications for sensitive social graphs and other graph-structured data analyses.
Abstract
The analysis of network assortativity is of great importance for understanding the structural characteristics of and dynamics upon networks. Often, network assortativity is quantified using the assortativity coefficient that is defined based on the Pearson correlation coefficient between vertex degrees. It is well known that a network may contain sensitive information, such as the number of friends of an individual in a social network (which is abstracted as the degree of vertex.). So, the computation of the assortativity coefficient leads to privacy leakage, which increases the urgent need for privacy-preserving protocol. However, there has been no scheme addressing the concern above. To bridge this gap, in this work, we are the first to propose approaches based on differential privacy (DP for short). Specifically, we design three DP-based algorithms: $Local_{ru}$, $Shuffle_{ru}$, and $Decentral_{ru}$. The first two algorithms, based on Local DP (LDP) and Shuffle DP respectively, are designed for settings where each individual only knows his/her direct friends. In contrast, the third algorithm, based on Decentralized DP (DDP), targets scenarios where each individual has a broader view, i.e., also knowing his/her friends' friends. Theoretically, we prove that each algorithm enables an unbiased estimation of the assortativity coefficient of the network. We further evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms using mean squared error (MSE), showing that $Shuffle_{ru}$ achieves the best performance, followed by $Decentral_{ru}$, with $Local_{ru}$ performing the worst. Note that these three algorithms have different assumptions, so each has its applicability scenario. Lastly, we conduct extensive numerical simulations, which demonstrate that the presented approaches are adequate to achieve the estimation of network assortativity under the demand for privacy protection.