Controlling the Spread of Epidemics on Networks with Differential Privacy

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nguyen, Dung, Srinivasan, Aravind, Valieva, Renata, Vullikanti, Anil, Wu, Jiayi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Nguyen, Dung
Srinivasan, Aravind
Valieva, Renata
Vullikanti, Anil
Wu, Jiayi
author_facet Nguyen, Dung
Srinivasan, Aravind
Valieva, Renata
Vullikanti, Anil
Wu, Jiayi
contents Designing effective strategies for controlling epidemic spread by vaccination is an important question in epidemiology, especially in the early stages when vaccines are limited. This is a challenging question when the contact network is very heterogeneous, and strategies based on controlling network properties, such as the degree and spectral radius, have been shown to be effective. Implementation of such strategies requires detailed information on the contact structure, which might be sensitive in many applications. Our focus here is on choosing effective vaccination strategies when the edges are sensitive and differential privacy guarantees are needed. Our main contributions are $(\varepsilon,δ)$-differentially private algorithms for designing vaccination strategies by reducing the maximum degree and spectral radius. Our key technique is a private algorithm for the multi-set multi-cover problem, which we use for controlling network properties. We evaluate privacy-utility tradeoffs of our algorithms on multiple synthetic and real-world networks, and show their effectiveness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_00745
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Controlling the Spread of Epidemics on Networks with Differential Privacy
Nguyen, Dung
Srinivasan, Aravind
Valieva, Renata
Vullikanti, Anil
Wu, Jiayi
Data Structures and Algorithms
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Social and Information Networks
Designing effective strategies for controlling epidemic spread by vaccination is an important question in epidemiology, especially in the early stages when vaccines are limited. This is a challenging question when the contact network is very heterogeneous, and strategies based on controlling network properties, such as the degree and spectral radius, have been shown to be effective. Implementation of such strategies requires detailed information on the contact structure, which might be sensitive in many applications. Our focus here is on choosing effective vaccination strategies when the edges are sensitive and differential privacy guarantees are needed. Our main contributions are $(\varepsilon,δ)$-differentially private algorithms for designing vaccination strategies by reducing the maximum degree and spectral radius. Our key technique is a private algorithm for the multi-set multi-cover problem, which we use for controlling network properties. We evaluate privacy-utility tradeoffs of our algorithms on multiple synthetic and real-world networks, and show their effectiveness.
title Controlling the Spread of Epidemics on Networks with Differential Privacy
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00745