Grid Adaptive Bucketing Algorithm Based on Differential Privacy

Abstract

With the popularity of location-based services, the restricted relationship between the availability of big location data and user’s privacy security has become a challenging issue. The spatial division is an effective measure for statistical location data characteristics. This paper proposes a grid adaptive bucketing algorithm based on differential privacy (GAB) to solve the problem that the existing differential privacy location data division method does not fully consider the distribution characteristics of spatial data points and noise superimposition. The algorithm first divides the mobile app location spatial data set into two layers of grids. It then performs adaptive binning judgment according to the square sum error value in the divided area. It puts areas with similar distributions into the same bucket, reducing the uniform assumption error and the noise error caused by many blank areas. Finally, a noise allocation strategy based on Hopkins statistic is adopted to achieve a reasonable noise allocation. The experimental results on two real large-scale location data sets, Checkin and Beijing, show that, compared with other classical algorithms based on differential privacy space partitioning, the GAB algorithm performs better in common evaluation indicators such as relative error and absolute error, which means GAB can obtain better range query effects and privacy protection effects.