A Privacy-preserving Histogram Construction Method Guaranteeing the Differential Privacy

In Cheol Baek, Jongseon Kim, Yon Dohn Chung

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2022.49.6.488

With the widespread use of data collection and analysis, the need for preserving the privacy of individuals is emerging. Various privacy models have been proposed to guarantee privacy while collecting and analyzing data in a privacy-preserving manner. Among various privacy models, the differential privacy stands as the de facto standard. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving histogram construction method guaranteeing differential privacy. The proposed method consists of histogram bin setting and frequency calculation stages. In the first stage, we use the Laplace mechanism to heuristic bin setting algorithms to select a differentially private number of bins. In the second stage, we use the Laplace mechanism to each frequency falling into the bins to output differentially private frequencies. We prove the proposed method guarantees differential privacy and compare the accuracy according to privacy budget values and distribution rates through experiments.