Ping Wang

Fei Ma, Ping Wang

Randomized response, as a basic building-block for differentially private mechanism, has given rise to great interest and found various potential applications in science communities. In this work, we are concerned with three-elements randomized response (RR$_{3}$) along with relevant applications to the analysis of weighted bipartite graph upon differentially private guarantee. We develop a principled framework for estimating statistics produced by RR$_{3}$-based mechanisms, and then prove the corresponding estimations to be unbiased. At the same time, we study in detail several fundamental and significant members in RR$_{3}$ family, and derive the closed-form solutions to unbiased estimations. Next, we show potential applications of several RR$_{3}$-based mechanisms into the estimation of average degree and average weighted value on weighted bipartite graph when requiring local differential privacy guarantee. In the meantime, we determine the lower bounds for choice of relevant parameters by minimizing variance of statistics in order to design optimal RR$_{3}$-based local differential private mechanisms, with which we optimize previous protocols in the literature and put forward a version that achieves the tight bound. Last but most importantly, we observe that in the analysis of relational data such as weighted bipartite graph, a portion of privacy budget in local differential private mechanism is sometimes "consumed" by mechanism itself accidentally, resulting to a more stronger privacy guarantee than we would get by simply sequential compositions.

Fei Ma, Renbo Zhu, Ping Wang

Privacy preserving data analysis (PPDA) has received increasing attention due to a great variety of applications. Local differential privacy (LDP), as an emerging standard that is suitable for PPDA, has been widely deployed into various real-world scenarios to analyze massive data while protecting against many forms of privacy breach. In this study, we are mainly concerned with piecewise transformation technique (PTT) for analyzing numerical data under local differential privacy. We provide a principled framework for PTT in the context of LDP, based on which PTT is studied systematically. As a result, we show that (1) many members in PTTs are asymptotically optimal when used to obtain an unbiased estimator for mean of numerical data, and (2) for a given privacy budget, there is PTT that reaches the theoretical low bound with respect to variance. Next, we prove by studying two classes of PTTs in detail that (1) there do not exist optimal PTTs compared to the well-used technique, i.e., Duchi's scheme, in terms of the consistency noisy variance, (2) on the other hand, one has the ability to find a great number of PTTs that are consistently more optimal than the latter with regard to the worst-case noisy variance, which is never reported so far. When we are restricted to consider only the high privacy level, enough PTTs turn out to be optimal than the well-known Laplace mechanism. Lastly, we prove that for a family of PTTs, the correspondingly theoretical low bound of noisy variance follows $O(ε^{-2})$ when considering the high privacy level.

Renbo Zhu, Meng Ma, Ping Wang

Entity alignment (EA) is the task to discover entities referring to the same real-world object from different knowledge graphs (KGs), which is the most crucial step in integrating multi-source KGs. The majority of the existing embeddings-based entity alignment methods embed entities and relations into a vector space based on relation triples of KGs for local alignment. As these methods insufficiently consider the multiple relations between entities, the structure information of KGs has not been fully leveraged. In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on Relation-aware Graph Attention Networks to capture the interactions between entities and relations. Our framework adopts the self-attention mechanism to spread entity information to the relations and then aggregate relation information back to entities. Furthermore, we propose a global alignment algorithm to make one-to-one entity alignments with a fine-grained similarity matrix. Experiments on three real-world cross-lingual datasets show that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.