arXiv subjects

Aria Rezaei

Publications and source records attributed to Aria Rezaei.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

Application-driven Privacy-preserving Data Publishing with Correlated Attributes

Recent advances in computing have allowed for the possibility to collect large amounts of data on personal activities and private living spaces. To address the privacy concerns of users in this environment, we propose a novel framework called PR-GAN that offers privacy-preserving mechanism using generative adversarial networks. Given a target application, PR-GAN automatically modifies the data to hide sensitive attributes -- which may be hidden and can be inferred by machine learning algorithms -- while preserving the data utility in the target application. Unlike prior works, the public's possible knowledge of the correlation between the target application and sensitive attributes is built into our modeling. We formulate our problem as an optimization problem, show that an optimal solution exists and use generative adversarial networks (GAN) to create perturbations. We further show that our method provides privacy guarantees under the Pufferfish framework, an elegant generalization of the differential privacy that allows for the modeling of prior knowledge on data and correlations. Through experiments, we show that our method outperforms conventional methods in effectively hiding the sensitive attributes while guaranteeing high performance in the target application, for both property inference and training purposes. Finally, we demonstrate through further experiments that once our model learns a privacy-preserving task, such as hiding subjects' identity, on a group of individuals, it can perform the same task on a separate group with minimal performance drops.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Influencers and the Giant Component: the Fundamental Hardness in Privacy Protection for Socially Contagious Attributes

The presence of correlation is known to make privacy protection more difficult. We investigate the privacy of socially contagious attributes on a network of individuals, where each individual possessing that attribute may influence a number of others into adopting it. We show that for contagions following the Independent Cascade model there exists a giant connected component of infected nodes, containing a constant fraction of all the nodes who all receive the contagion from the same set of sources. We further show that it is extremely hard to hide the existence of this giant connected component if we want to obtain an estimate of the activated users at an acceptable level. Moreover, an adversary possessing this knowledge can predict the real status ("active" or "inactive") with decent probability for many of the individuals regardless of the privacy (perturbation) mechanism used. As a case study, we show that the Wasserstein mechanism, a state-of-the-art privacy mechanism designed specifically for correlated data, introduces a noise with magnitude of order $Ω(n)$ in the count estimation in our setting. We provide theoretical guarantees for two classes of random networks: Erdos Renyi graphs and Chung-Lu power-law graphs under the Independent Cascade model. Experiments demonstrate that a giant connected component of infected nodes can and does appear in real-world networks and that a simple inference attack can reveal the status of a good fraction of nodes.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

On Privacy of Socially Contagious Attributes

A commonly used method to protect user privacy in data collection is to perform randomized perturbation on user's real data before collection so that aggregated statistics can still be inferred without endangering secrets held by individuals. In this paper, we take a closer look at the validity of Differential Privacy guarantees, when the sensitive attributes are subject to social influence and contagions. We first show that in the absence of any knowledge about the contagion network, an adversary that tries to predict the real values from perturbed ones, cannot achieve an area under the ROC curve (AUC) above $1-(1-δ)/(1+e^\varepsilon)$, if the dataset is perturbed using an $(\varepsilon,δ)$-differentially private mechanism. Then, we show that with the knowledge of the contagion network and model, one can do significantly better. We demonstrate that our method passes the performance limit imposed by differential privacy. Our experiments also reveal that nodes with high influence on others are at more risk of revealing their secrets than others. The performance is shown through extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world networks.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2018

Improved Bounds on Information Dissemination by Manhattan Random Waypoint Model

With the popularity of portable wireless devices it is important to model and predict how information or contagions spread by natural human mobility -- for understanding the spreading of deadly infectious diseases and for improving delay tolerant communication schemes. Formally, we model this problem by considering $M$ moving agents, where each agent initially carries a \emph{distinct} bit of information. When two agents are at the same location or in close proximity to one another, they share all their information with each other. We would like to know the time it takes until all bits of information reach all agents, called the \textit{flood time}, and how it depends on the way agents move, the size and shape of the network and the number of agents moving in the network. We provide rigorous analysis for the \MRWP model (which takes paths with minimum number of turns), a convenient model used previously to analyze mobile agents, and find that with high probability the flood time is bounded by $O\big(N\log M\lceil(N/M) \log(NM)\rceil\big)$, where $M$ agents move on an $N\times N$ grid. In addition to extensive simulations, we use a data set of taxi trajectories to show that our method can successfully predict flood times in both experimental settings and the real world.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2017

Ties That Bind - Characterizing Classes by Attributes and Social Ties

Given a set of attributed subgraphs known to be from different classes, how can we discover their differences? There are many cases where collections of subgraphs may be contrasted against each other. For example, they may be assigned ground truth labels (spam/not-spam), or it may be desired to directly compare the biological networks of different species or compound networks of different chemicals. In this work we introduce the problem of characterizing the differences between attributed subgraphs that belong to different classes. We define this characterization problem as one of partitioning the attributes into as many groups as the number of classes, while maximizing the total attributed quality score of all the given subgraphs. We show that our attribute-to-class assignment problem is NP-hard and an optimal $(1 - 1/e)$-approximation algorithm exists. We also propose two different faster heuristics that are linear-time in the number of attributes and subgraphs. Unlike previous work where only attributes were taken into account for characterization, here we exploit both attributes and social ties (i.e. graph structure). Through extensive experiments, we compare our proposed algorithms, show findings that agree with human intuition on datasets from Amazon co-purchases, Congressional bill sponsorships, and DBLP co-authorships. We also show that our approach of characterizing subgraphs is better suited for sense-making than discriminating classification approaches.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2015

Controlled Label Propagation: Preventing Over-Propagation through Gradual Expansion

Identifying communities has always been a fundamental task in analysis of complex networks. Many methods have been devised over the last decade for detection of communities. Amongst them, the label propagation algorithm brings great scalability together with high accuracy. However, it has one major flaw; when the community structure in the network is not clear enough, it will assign every node the same label, thus detecting the whole graph as one giant community. We have addressed this issue by setting a capacity for communities, starting from a small value and gradually increasing it over time. Preliminary results show that not only our extension improves the detection capability of classic label propagation algorithm when communities are not clearly detectable, but also improves the overall quality of the identified clusters in complex networks with a clear community structure.

cs.SI↗