GCON: Differentially Private Graph Convolutional Network via Objective Perturbation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wei, Jianxin, Zhu, Yizheng, Xiao, Xiaokui, Bao, Ergute, Yang, Yin, Cai, Kuntai, Ooi, Beng Chin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909469759242240
author Wei, Jianxin
Zhu, Yizheng
Xiao, Xiaokui
Bao, Ergute
Yang, Yin
Cai, Kuntai
Ooi, Beng Chin
author_facet Wei, Jianxin
Zhu, Yizheng
Xiao, Xiaokui
Bao, Ergute
Yang, Yin
Cai, Kuntai
Ooi, Beng Chin
contents Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are a popular machine learning model with a wide range of applications in graph analytics, including healthcare, transportation, and finance. However, a GCN trained without privacy protection measures may memorize private interpersonal relationships in the training data through its model parameters. This poses a substantial risk of compromising privacy through link attacks, potentially leading to violations of privacy regulations such as GDPR. To defend against such attacks, a promising approach is to train the GCN with differential privacy (DP), a rigorous framework that provides strong privacy protection by injecting random noise into the training process. However, training a GCN under DP is a highly challenging task. Existing solutions either perturb the graph topology or inject randomness into the graph convolution operations, or overestimate the amount of noise required, resulting in severe distortions of the network's message aggregation and, thus, poor model utility. Motivated by this, we propose GCON, a novel and effective solution for training GCNs with edge differential privacy. GCON leverages the classic idea of perturbing the objective function to satisfy DP and maintains an unaltered graph convolution process. Our rigorous theoretical analysis offers tight, closed-form bounds on the sensitivity of the graph convolution results and quantifies the impact of an edge modification on the trained model parameters. Extensive experiments using multiple benchmark datasets across diverse settings demonstrate the consistent superiority of GCON over existing solutions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_05034
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GCON: Differentially Private Graph Convolutional Network via Objective Perturbation
Wei, Jianxin
Zhu, Yizheng
Xiao, Xiaokui
Bao, Ergute
Yang, Yin
Cai, Kuntai
Ooi, Beng Chin
Cryptography and Security
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are a popular machine learning model with a wide range of applications in graph analytics, including healthcare, transportation, and finance. However, a GCN trained without privacy protection measures may memorize private interpersonal relationships in the training data through its model parameters. This poses a substantial risk of compromising privacy through link attacks, potentially leading to violations of privacy regulations such as GDPR. To defend against such attacks, a promising approach is to train the GCN with differential privacy (DP), a rigorous framework that provides strong privacy protection by injecting random noise into the training process. However, training a GCN under DP is a highly challenging task. Existing solutions either perturb the graph topology or inject randomness into the graph convolution operations, or overestimate the amount of noise required, resulting in severe distortions of the network's message aggregation and, thus, poor model utility. Motivated by this, we propose GCON, a novel and effective solution for training GCNs with edge differential privacy. GCON leverages the classic idea of perturbing the objective function to satisfy DP and maintains an unaltered graph convolution process. Our rigorous theoretical analysis offers tight, closed-form bounds on the sensitivity of the graph convolution results and quantifies the impact of an edge modification on the trained model parameters. Extensive experiments using multiple benchmark datasets across diverse settings demonstrate the consistent superiority of GCON over existing solutions.
title GCON: Differentially Private Graph Convolutional Network via Objective Perturbation
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05034