Survey on Improving Data Utility in Differentially Private Sequential Data Publishing

Abstract

The massive generation, extensive sharing, and deep exploitation of data in the big data era have raised unprecedented privacy threats. To address privacy concerns, various privacy paradigms have been proposed to achieve a good tradeoff between privacy and data utility. Particularly, differential privacy has been well accepted as one of the de facto standard for privacy preservation, and numerous schemes guaranteeing differential privacy have been proposed. Nonetheless, most of the existing works claiming a superior utility-privacy tradeoff only present specific methods, with distinct perspectives, and a complete comparative analysis and evaluation study has not been fully investigated. To this end, in this paper we review and investigate existing schemes on providing differential privacy from a broad and encompassing perspective to provide a comprehensive survey with respect to both the privacy guarantee and the effectiveness and efficiency in utility improvement. We categorize the existing schemes into distribution optimization, sensitivity calibration, transformation, decomposition, and correlations exploitation, based on their mechanisms in improving data utility. We also conduct some analysis and comparison of their various concepts and principles, focusing on improvements to data utility. Finally, we outline some challenges and provide future research directions.