Differentially Private and Scalable Estimation of the Network Principal Component

Computing the principal component (PC) of the adjacency matrix of an undirected graph has several applications ranging from identifying key vertices for influence maximization and controlling diffusion processes, to discovering densely interconnected vertex subsets. However, many networked datasets are sensitive, which necessitates private computation of the PC for use in the aforementioned applications. Differential privacy has emerged as the gold standard in privacy-preserving data analysis, but existing DP algorithms for private PC suffer from low accuracy due to large noise injection or high complexity. Motivated by the large gap between the local and global sensitivities of the PC on real-graphs, we consider instance-specific mechanisms for privately computing the PC under edge-DP. These mechanisms guarantee privacy for all datasets, but provide good utility on ``well-behaved'' datasets by injecting smaller amounts of noise. More specifically, we consider the Propose-Test-Release (PTR) framework. Although computationally expensive in general, we design a novel approach for implementing a PTR variant in the same time as computation of a non-private PC, while offering good utility. Our framework tests in a differentially-private manner whether a given graph is ``well-behaved'' or not, and then tests whether its private to release a noisy PC with small noise. As a consequence, this also leads to the first DP algorithm for the Densest-$k$-subgraph problem, a key graph mining primitive. We run our method on diverse real-world networks, with the largest having 3 million vertices, and compare its utility to a pre-existing baseline based on the private power method (PPM). Although PTR requires a slightly larger privacy budget, on average, it achieves a 180-fold improvement in runtime over PPM.