Differential privacy preserving clustering using Daubechies-2 wavelet transform

Abstract

Most of the existing privacy preserving clustering (PPC) algorithms do not consider the worst case privacy guarantees and are based on heuristic notions. In addition, these algorithms do not run efficiently in the case of high dimensionality of data. In this paper, to alleviate these challenges, we propose a new PPC algorithm, which is based on Daubechies-2 wavelet transform (D2WT) and preserves the differential privacy notion. Differential privacy is the strong notion of privacy, which provides the worst case privacy guarantees. On the other hand, most of the existing differential-based PPC algorithms generate data with poor utility. If we apply differential privacy properties over the original raw data, the resulting data will offer lower quality of clustering (QOC) during the clustering analysis. Therefore, we use D2WT for the preprocessing of the original data before adding noise to the data. By applying D2WT to the original data, the resulting data not only contains lower dimension compared to the original data, but also can provide differential privacy guarantee with high QOC due to less noise addition. The proposed algorithm has been implemented and experimented over some well-known datasets. We also compare the proposed algorithm with some recently introduced algorithms based on utility and privacy degrees.