Plausible Heterogeneous Graph $k$-Anonymization for Social Networks

Abstract

The inefficient utilization of ubiquitous graph data with combinatorial structures necessitates graph embedding methods, aiming at learning a continuous vector space for the graph which is amenable to be adopted in traditional machine learning algorithms in favor of vector representations. Graph embedding methods build an important bridge between social network analysis and data analytics as social networks naturally generate an unprecedented volume of graph data continuously. Publishing social network data not only bring benefit for public health, disaster response, commercial promotion, and many other applications, but also give birth to threats that jeopardize each individual's privacy and security. Unfortunately, most existing works in publishing social graph embedding data only focus on preserving social graph structure with less attention paid to the privacy issues inherited from social networks. To be specific, attackers can infer the presence of a sensitive relationship between two individuals by training a predictive model with the exposed social network embedding. In this paper, we propose a novel link-privacy preserved graph embedding framework using adversarial learning, which can reduce adversary's prediction accuracy on sensitive links while persevering sufficient non-sensitive information such as graph topology and node attributes in graph embedding. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed framework using ground truth social network datasets.