Poincaré Differential Privacy for Hierarchy-Aware Graph Embedding

Hierarchy is an important and commonly observed topological property in real-world graphs that indicate the relationships between supervisors and subordinates or the organizational behavior of human groups. As hierarchy is introduced as a new inductive bias into the Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in various tasks, it implies latent topological relations for attackers to improve their inference attack performance, leading to serious privacy leakage issues. In addition, existing privacy-preserving frameworks suffer from reduced protection ability in hierarchical propagation due to the deficiency of adaptive upper-bound estimation of the hierarchical perturbation boundary. It is of great urgency to effectively leverage the hierarchical property of data while satisfying privacy guarantees. To solve the problem, we propose the Poincaré Differential Privacy framework, named PoinDP, to protect the hierarchy-aware graph embedding based on hyperbolic geometry. Specifically, PoinDP first learns the hierarchy weights for each entity based on the Poincaré model in hyperbolic space. Then, the Personalized Hierarchy-aware Sensitivity is designed to measure the sensitivity of the hierarchical structure and adaptively allocate the privacy protection strength. Besides, Hyperbolic Gaussian Mechanism (HGM) is proposed to extend the Gaussian mechanism in Euclidean space to hyperbolic space to realize random perturbations that satisfy differential privacy under the hyperbolic space metric. Extensive experiment results on five real-world datasets demonstrate the proposed PoinDP’s advantages of effective privacy protection while maintaining good performance on the node classification task.