Truth Inference on Sparse Crowdsourcing Data with Local Differential Privacy

Haipei Sun, Boxiang Dong, Hui Wendy Wang, Ting Yu, Zhan Qin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a new problem-solving paradigm for tasks that are difficult for computers but easy for humans. Since the answers collected from the recruited participants (workers) may contain sensitive information, crowdsourcing raises serious privacy concerns. In this paper, we investigate the problem of protecting user privacy under local differential privacy (LDP), where individual workers randomize their answers independently and send the perturbed answers to the task requester. The utility goal is to ensure high accuracy of the inferred true answers (i.e., truth) from the perturbed data. One of the challenges of LDP perturbation is the sparsity of worker answers (i.e., each worker only answers a small number of tasks). Simple extension of existing approaches (e.g., Laplace perturbation and randomized response) may incur large errors in truth inference on sparse data. Thus we design a new matrix factorization (MF) algorithm under LDP that addresses the trade-off between privacy and utility (i.e., accuracy of truth inference). We prove that our MF algorithm can provide both LDP guarantee and small error of truth inference, regardless of the sparsity of worker answers. We perform extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets, and demonstrate that the MF algorithm performs better than the existing LDP algorithms on sparse crowdsourcing data.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2018
EditorsNaoki Abe, Huan Liu, Calton Pu, Xiaohua Hu, Nesreen Ahmed, Mu Qiao, Yang Song, Donald Kossmann, Bing Liu, Kisung Lee, Jiliang Tang, Jingrui He, Jeffrey Saltz
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages488-497
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781538650356
DOIs
StatePublished - 2 Jul 2018
Event2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2018 - Seattle, United States
Duration: 10 Dec 201813 Dec 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2018

Conference

Conference2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeattle
Period10/12/1813/12/18

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Truth Inference on Sparse Crowdsourcing Data with Local Differential Privacy'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this