TIDY: Publishing a Time Interval Dataset with Differential Privacy (Extended abstract)

Abstract

Log data from mobile devices usually contain a series of events with time intervals. However, the problem of releasing differentially private time interval data has not been tackled yet. We propose the TIDY (publishing Time Intervals via Differential privacY) algorithm to release time interval data under differential privacy. We use the frequency vectors as a compact representation of the time interval data to reduce the aggregated noise. We also develop a new partitioning method adapted for the frequency vectors to balance the trade-off between the noise and structural errors. Our experiments confirm that TIDY outperforms the existing algorithms for releasing 2D histograms.