All-Pairs Shortest Path Distances with Differential Privacy: Improved Algorithms for Bounded and Unbounded Weights

Justin Y. Chen; Shyam Narayanan; Yinzhan Xu

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arXiv · 2204.02335

All-Pairs Shortest Path Distances with Differential Privacy: Improved Algorithms for Bounded and Unbounded Weights

Justin Y. Chen·Shyam Narayanan·Yinzhan Xu

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Abstract

We revisit the problem of privately releasing the all-pairs shortest path distances of a weighted undirected graph up to low additive error, which was first studied by Sealfon [Sea16]. In this paper, we improve significantly on Sealfon's results, both for arbitrary weighted graphs and for bounded-weight graphs on $n$ nodes. Specifically, we provide an approximate-DP algorithm that outputs all-pairs shortest path distances up to maximum additive error $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n})$, and a pure-DP algorithm that outputs all pairs shortest path distances up to maximum additive error $\tilde{O}(n^{2/3})$ (where we ignore dependencies on $\varepsilon, \delta$). This improves over the previous best result of $\tilde{O}(n)$ additive error for both approximate-DP and pure-DP [Sea16], and partially resolves an open question posed by Sealfon [Sea16, Sea20]. We also show that if the graph is promised to have reasonably bounded weights, one can improve the error further to roughly $n^{\sqrt{2}-1+o(1)}$ in the approximate-DP setting and roughly $n^{(\sqrt{17}-3)/2 + o(1)}$ in the pure-DP setting. Previously, it was only known how to obtain $\tilde{O}(n^{1/2})$ additive error in the approximate-DP setting and $\tilde{O}(n^{2/3})$ additive error in the pure-DP setting for bounded-weight graphs [Sea16].

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Justin Y. Chen, Shyam Narayanan, Yinzhan Xu. 2022-04-05. All-Pairs Shortest Path Distances with Differential Privacy: Improved Algorithms for Bounded and Unbounded Weights. https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02335

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