Risk-aware Road-network Trajectory Synthesis under Local Differential Privacy

Abstract

Road-network trajectory synthesis under local differential privacy (LDP) enables mobility data analysis without uploading raw trajectories to an untrusted server. Existing locally private trajectory synthesis methods mainly model whole trajectories, point sequences, or grid-level mobility patterns. However, they cannot handle non-uniform privacy risks caused by local road-network and trajectory contexts, such as endpoints, long-stay-associated regions, and low-out-degree branches. They also do not directly protect conditional next-hop choices on road networks, where a user's selected successor may reveal sensitive local movement intentions. To address these challenges, we propose TrajRACE, a locally private synthesis framework for road-network trajectories. TrajRACE uses start, segment-count, and transition reports to represent trajectories. For each transition, it keeps the current road segment as a public aggregation context and perturbs the true successor among legal successors on the client side. It then assigns risk-aware protection strengths to transitions according to local road-network and trajectory contexts. Finally, the server recovers population-level start, segment-count, and conditional transition statistics from heterogeneous privatized reports, and generates synthetic trajectories that follow the public road-network topology. Experiments on three road-network trajectory datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of TrajRACE in improving synthetic-data utility across distributional, query-based, and pattern-level metrics, while providing stronger protection for high-risk local transitions.