Evading Community Detection via Counterfactual Neighborhood Search

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bernini, Andrea, Silvestri, Fabrizio, Tolomei, Gabriele
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Bernini, Andrea
Silvestri, Fabrizio
Tolomei, Gabriele
author_facet Bernini, Andrea
Silvestri, Fabrizio
Tolomei, Gabriele
contents Community detection techniques are useful for social media platforms to discover tightly connected groups of users who share common interests. However, this functionality often comes at the expense of potentially exposing individuals to privacy breaches by inadvertently revealing their tastes or preferences. Therefore, some users may wish to preserve their anonymity and opt out of community detection for various reasons, such as affiliation with political or religious organizations, without leaving the platform. In this study, we address the challenge of community membership hiding, which involves strategically altering the structural properties of a network graph to prevent one or more nodes from being identified by a given community detection algorithm. We tackle this problem by formulating it as a constrained counterfactual graph objective, and we solve it via deep reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines, striking the best balance between accuracy and cost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_08909
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evading Community Detection via Counterfactual Neighborhood Search
Bernini, Andrea
Silvestri, Fabrizio
Tolomei, Gabriele
Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Community detection techniques are useful for social media platforms to discover tightly connected groups of users who share common interests. However, this functionality often comes at the expense of potentially exposing individuals to privacy breaches by inadvertently revealing their tastes or preferences. Therefore, some users may wish to preserve their anonymity and opt out of community detection for various reasons, such as affiliation with political or religious organizations, without leaving the platform. In this study, we address the challenge of community membership hiding, which involves strategically altering the structural properties of a network graph to prevent one or more nodes from being identified by a given community detection algorithm. We tackle this problem by formulating it as a constrained counterfactual graph objective, and we solve it via deep reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines, striking the best balance between accuracy and cost.
title Evading Community Detection via Counterfactual Neighborhood Search
topic Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08909