Enhancing data utility in differential privacy via microaggregation-based k-anonymity

It is not uncommon in the data anonymization literature to oppose the “old” \(k\) -anonymity model to the “new” differential privacy model, which offers more robust privacy guarantees. Yet, it is often disregarded that the utility of the anonymized results provided by differential privacy is quite limited, due to the amount of noise that needs to be added to the output, or because utility can only be guaranteed for a restricted type of queries. This is in contrast with \(k\) -anonymity mechanisms, which make no assumptions on the uses of anonymized data while focusing on preserving data utility from a general perspective. In this paper, we show that a synergy between differential privacy and \(k\) -anonymity can be found: \(k\) -anonymity can help improving the utility of differentially private responses to arbitrary queries. We devote special attention to the utility improvement of differentially private published data sets. Specifically, we show that the amount of noise required to fulfill \(\varepsilon \) -differential privacy can be reduced if noise is added to a \(k\) -anonymous version of the data set, where \(k\) -anonymity is reached through a specially designed microaggregation of all attributes. As a result of noise reduction, the general analytical utility of the anonymized output is increased. The theoretical benefits of our proposal are illustrated in a practical setting with an empirical evaluation on three data sets.     

High utility K-anonymization for social network publishing

Privacy and utility are two main desiderata of good sensitive information publishing schemes. For publishing social networks, many existing algorithms rely on \(k\) -anonymity as a criterion to guarantee privacy protection. They reduce the utility loss by first using the degree sequence to model the structural properties of the original social network and then minimizing the changes on the degree sequence caused by the anonymization process. However, the degree sequence-based graph model is simple, and it fails to capture many important graph topological properties. Consequently, the existing anonymization algorithms that rely on this simple graph model to measure utility cannot guarantee generating anonymized social networks of high utility. In this paper, we propose novel utility measurements that are based on more complex community-based graph models. We also design a general \(k\) -anonymization framework, which can be used with various utility measurements to achieve \(k\) -anonymity with small utility loss on given social networks. Finally, we conduct extensive experimental evaluation on real datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of the new utility measurements proposed. The results demonstrate that our scheme achieves significant improvement on the utility of the anonymized social networks compared with the existing anonymization algorithms. The utility losses of many social network statistics of the anonymized social networks generated by our scheme are under 1 % in most cases.     

Some kinds of primitive and non-primitive words

If the length of a primitive word \(p\) is equal to the length of another primitive word \(q\) , then \(p^{n}q^{m}\) is a primitive word for any \(n,m\ge 1\) and \((n,m)\ne (1,1)\) . This was obtained separately by Tetsuo Moriya in 2008 and Shyr and Yu in 1994. In this paper, we prove that if the length of \(p\) is divisible by the length of \(q\) and the length of \(p\) is less than or equal to \(m\) times the length of \(q\) , then \(p^{n}q^{m}\) is a primitive word for any \(n,m\ge 1\) and \((n,m)\ne (1,1)\) . Then we show that if \(uv,u\) are non-primitive words and the length of \(u\) is divisible by the length \(v\) or one of the length of \(u\) and \(uv\) is odd for any two nonempty words \(u\) and \(v\) , then \(u\) is a power of \(v\) .     

The categories L-\mathbf{Top}_{0} and L-\mathbf{Sob} as epireflective hulls

We show that the category \(L\) - \(\mathbf{Top}_{0}\) of \(T_{0}\) - \(L\) -topological spaces is the epireflective hull of Sierpinski \(L\) -topological space in the category \(L\) - \(\mathbf{Top}\) of \(L\) -topological spaces and the category \(L\) - \(\mathbf{Sob}\) of sober \(L\) -topological spaces is the epireflective hull of Sierpinski \(L\) -topological space in the category \(L\) - \(\mathbf{Top}_{0}\) .     

Informational correlation between two parties of a quantum system: spin-1/2 chains

We introduce the informational correlation \(E^{AB}\) between two interacting quantum subsystems \(A\) and \(B\) of a quantum system as the number of arbitrary parameters \(\varphi _i\) of a unitary transformation \(U^A\) (locally performed on the subsystem \(A\) ) which may be detected in the subsystem \(B\) by the local measurements. This quantity indicates whether the state of the subsystem \(B\) may be effected by means of the unitary transformation applied to the subsystem \(A\) . Emphasize that \(E^{AB}\ne E^{BA}\) in general. The informational correlations in systems with tensor product initial states are studied in more details. In particular, it is shown that the informational correlation may be changed by the local unitary transformations of the subsystem \(B\) . However, there is some non-reducible part of \(E^{AB}(t)\) which may not be decreased by any unitary transformation of the subsystem \(B\) at a fixed time instant \(t\) . Two examples of the informational correlations between two parties of the four-node spin-1/2 chain with mixed initial states are studied. The long chains with a single initially excited spin (the pure initial state) are considered as well.     

Strong Conflict-Free Coloring for Intervals

We consider the \(k\) -strong conflict-free ( \(k\) -SCF) coloring of a set of points on a line with respect to a family of intervals: Each point on the line must be assigned a color so that the coloring is conflict-free in the following sense: in every interval \(I\) of the family there are at least \(k\) colors each appearing exactly once in \(I\) . We first present a polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the general problem; the algorithm has approximation ratio 2 when \(k=1\) and \(5-\frac{2}{k}\) when \(k\ge 2\) . In the special case of a family that contains all possible intervals on the given set of points, we show that a 2-approximation algorithm exists, for any \(k \ge 1\) . We also provide, in case \(k=O({{\mathrm{polylog}}}(n))\) , a quasipolynomial time algorithm to decide the existence of a \(k\) -SCF coloring that uses at most \(q\) colors.     

Finding peculiar compositions of two frequent strings with background texts

We consider mining unusual patterns from a set  \(T\) of target texts. A typical method outputs unusual patterns if their observed frequencies are far from their expectation estimated under an assumed probabilistic model. However, it is difficult for the method to deal with the zero frequency and thus it suffers from data sparseness. We employ another set  \(B\) of background texts to define a composition  \(xy\) to be peculiar if both \(x\) and  \(y\) are more frequent in  \(B\) than in  \(T\) and conversely \(xy\) is more frequent in  \(T\) . \(xy\) is unusual because \(x\) and  \(y\) are infrequent in  \(T\) while \(xy\) is unexpectedly frequent compared to  \(xy\) in  \(B\) . To find frequent subpatterns and infrequent patterns simultaneously, we develop a fast algorithm using the suffix tree and show that it scales almost linearly under practical settings of parameters. Experiments using DNA sequences show that found peculiar compositions basically appear in rRNA while patterns found by an existing method seem not to relate to specific biological functions. We also show that discovered patterns have similar lengths at which the distribution of frequencies of fixed length substrings begins to skew. This fact explains why our method can find long peculiar compositions.     

Parameterized complexity of three edge contraction problems with degree constraints

For any graph class \(\mathcal{H}\) , the \(\mathcal{H}\) -Contraction problem takes as input a graph \(G\) and an integer \(k\) , and asks whether there exists a graph \(H\in \mathcal{H}\) such that \(G\) can be modified into \(H\) using at most \(k\) edge contractions. We study the parameterized complexity of \(\mathcal{H}\) -Contraction for three different classes \(\mathcal{H}\) : the class \(\mathcal{H}_{\le d}\) of graphs with maximum degree at most  \(d\) , the class \(\mathcal{H}_{=d}\) of \(d\) -regular graphs, and the class of \(d\) -degenerate graphs. We completely classify the parameterized complexity of all three problems with respect to the parameters \(k\) , \(d\) , and \(d+k\) . Moreover, we show that \(\mathcal{H}\) -Contraction admits an \(O(k)\) vertex kernel on connected graphs when \(\mathcal{H}\in \{\mathcal{H}_{\le 2},\mathcal{H}_{=2}\}\) , while the problem is \(\mathsf{W}[2]\) -hard when \(\mathcal{H}\) is the class of \(2\) -degenerate graphs and hence is expected not to admit a kernel at all. In particular, our results imply that \(\mathcal{H}\) -Contraction admits a linear vertex kernel when \(\mathcal{H}\) is the class of cycles.     

Isomorphisms and functors of fuzzy sets and cut systems

Any fuzzy set \(X\) in a classical set \(A\) with values in a complete (residuated) lattice \( Q\) can be identified with a system of \(\alpha \) -cuts \(X_{\alpha }\) , \(\alpha \in Q\) . Analogical results were proved for sets with similarity relations with values in \( Q\) (e.g. \( Q\) -sets), which are objects of two special categories \({\mathbf K}={Set}( Q)\) or \({SetR}( Q)\) of \( Q\) -sets, and for fuzzy sets defined as morphisms from an \( Q\) -set into a special \(Q\) -set \(( Q,\leftrightarrow )\) . These fuzzy sets can be defined equivalently as special cut systems \((C_{\alpha })_{\alpha }\) , called f-cuts. This equivalence then represents a natural isomorphism between covariant functor of fuzzy sets \(\mathcal{F}_{\mathbf K}\) and covariant functor of f-cuts \(\mathcal{C}_{\mathbf K}\) . In this paper, we prove that analogical natural isomorphism exists also between contravariant versions of these functors. We are also interested in relationships between sets of fuzzy sets and sets of f-cuts in an \(Q\) -set \((A,\delta )\) in the corresponding categories \({Set}( Q)\) and \({SetR}( Q)\) , which are endowed with binary operations extended either from binary operations in the lattice \(Q\) , or from binary operations defined in a set \(A\) by the generalized Zadeh’s extension principle. We prove that the resulting binary structures are (under some conditions) isomorphic.     

Fault tolerance of hypercubes and folded hypercubes

Let \(G = (V,E)\) be a connected graph. The conditional edge connectivity \(\lambda _\delta ^k(G)\) is the cardinality of the minimum edge cuts, if any, whose deletion disconnects \(G\) and each component of \(G - F\) has \(\delta \ge k\) . We assume that \(F \subseteq E\) is an edge set, \(F\) is called edge extra-cut, if \(G - F\) is not connected and each component of \(G - F\) has more than \(k\) vertices. The edge extraconnectivity \(\lambda _\mathrm{e}^k(G)\) is the cardinality of the minimum edge extra-cuts. In this paper, we study the conditional edge connectivity and edge extraconnectivity of hypercubes and folded hypercubes.     

Frequency capping in online advertising

We study the following online problem. There are n advertisers. Each advertiser \(a_i\) has a total demand \(d_i\) and a value \(v_i\) for each supply unit. Supply units arrive one by one in an online fashion, and must be allocated to an agent immediately. Each unit is associated with a user, and each advertiser \(a_i\) is willing to accept no more than \(f_i\) units associated with any single user (the value \(f_i\) is called the frequency cap of advertiser \(a_i\) ). The goal is to design an online allocation algorithm maximizing the total value. We first show a deterministic \(3/4\) -competitiveness upper bound, which holds even when all frequency caps are \(1\) , and all advertisers share identical values and demands. A competitive ratio approaching \(1-1/e\) can be achieved via a reduction to a different model considered by Goel and Mehta (WINE ‘07: Workshop on Internet and Network, Economics: 335–340, 2007). Our main contribution is analyzing two \(3/4\) -competitive greedy algorithms for the cases of equal values, and arbitrary valuations with equal integral demand to frequency cap ratios. Finally, we give a primal-dual algorithm which may serve as a good starting point for improving upon the ratio of \(1-1/e\) .     

Deriving length two path centered surface area for the arrangement graph: a generating function approach

We discuss the notion of \(H\) -centered surface area of a graph \(G\) , where \(H\) is a subgraph of \(G\) , i.e., the number of vertices in \(G\) at a certain distance from \(H\) , and focus on the special case when \(H\) is a length two path to derive an explicit formula for the length two path centered surface area of the general and scalable arrangement graph, following a generating function approach.     

Approximation of integrable functions based on \phi -transform

Let \(E\) be a bounded subset of real line which contains its infimum and supremum. In this paper, we have defined the \(\phi -\) transform and its inverse, where \(\phi \) is a function from \(E\) into \((0,1]\) . We will have shown that real-valued integrable functions on \([a, b]\) and real-valued continuous functions on \(E\) can be approximated by this transformation with an arbitrary precision.     

Universal regular control for generic semilinear systems

We consider discrete-time projective semilinear control systems \(\xi _{t+1} = A(u_t) \cdot \xi _t\) , where the states \(\xi _t\) are in projective space \(\mathbb {R}\hbox {P}^{d-1}\) , inputs \(u_t\) are in a manifold \(\mathcal {U}\) of arbitrary finite dimension, and \(A :\mathcal {U}\rightarrow \hbox {GL}(d,\mathbb {R})\) is a differentiable mapping. An input sequence \((u_0,\ldots ,u_{N-1})\) is called universally regular if for any initial state \(\xi _0 \in \mathbb {R}\hbox {P}^{d-1}\) , the derivative of the time- \(N\) state with respect to the inputs is onto. In this paper, we deal with the universal regularity of constant input sequences \((u_0, \ldots , u_0)\) . Our main result states that generically in the space of such systems, for sufficiently large \(N\) , all constant inputs of length \(N\) are universally regular, with the exception of a discrete set. More precisely, the conclusion holds for a \(C^2\) -open and \(C^\infty \) -dense set of maps \(A\) , and \(N\) only depends on \(d\) and on the dimension of \(\mathcal {U}\) . We also show that the inputs on that discrete set are nearly universally regular; indeed, there is a unique non-regular initial state, and its corank is 1. In order to establish the result, we study the spaces of bilinear control systems. We show that the codimension of the set of systems for which the zero input is not universally regular coincides with the dimension of the control space. The proof is based on careful matrix analysis and some elementary algebraic geometry. Then the main result follows by applying standard transversality theorems.     

Growth rates for persistently excited linear systems

We consider a family of linear control systems \(\dot{x}=Ax+\alpha Bu\) on \(\mathbb {R}^d\) , where \(\alpha \) belongs to a given class of persistently exciting signals. We seek maximal \(\alpha \) -uniform stabilization and destabilization by means of linear feedbacks \(u=Kx\) . We extend previous results obtained for bidimensional single-input linear control systems to the general case as follows: if there exists at least one \(K\) such that the Lie algebra generated by \(A\) and \(BK\) is equal to the set of all \(d\times d\) matrices, then the maximal rate of convergence of \((A,B)\) is equal to the maximal rate of divergence of \((-A,-B)\) . We also provide more precise results in the general single-input case, where the above result is obtained under the simpler assumption of controllability of the pair \((A,B)\) .     

Query reverse engineering

In this paper, we introduce a new problem termed query reverse engineering (QRE). Given a database \(D\) and a result table \(T\) —the output of some known or unknown query \(Q\) on \(D\) —the goal of QRE is to reverse-engineer a query \(Q'\) such that the output of query \(Q'\) on database \(D\) (denoted by \(Q'(D)\) ) is equal to \(T\) (i.e., \(Q(D)\) ). The QRE problem has useful applications in database usability, data analysis, and data security. In this work, we propose a data-driven approach, TALOS for Tree-based classifier with At Least One Semantics, that is based on a novel dynamic data classification formulation and extend the approach to efficiently support the three key dimensions of the QRE problem: whether the input query is known/unknown, supporting different query fragments, and supporting multiple database versions.     

Fault tolerance in distributed systems using fused state machines

Replication is a standard technique for fault tolerance in distributed systems modeled as deterministic finite state machines (DFSMs or machines). To correct \(f\) crash or \(\lfloor f/2 \rfloor \) Byzantine faults among \(n\) different machines, replication requires \(nf\) backup machines. We present a solution called fusion that requires just \(f\) backup machines. First, we build a framework for fault tolerance in DFSMs based on the notion of Hamming distances. We introduce the concept of an ( \(f\) , \(m\) )-fusion, which is a set of \(m\) backup machines that can correct \(f\) crash faults or \(\lfloor f/2 \rfloor \) Byzantine faults among a given set of machines. Second, we present an algorithm to generate an ( \(f\) , \(f\) )-fusion for a given set of machines. We ensure that our backups are efficient in terms of the size of their state and event sets. Third, we use locality sensitive hashing for the detection and correction of faults that incurs almost the same overhead as that for replication. We detect Byzantine faults with time complexity \(O(n f)\) on average while we correct crash and Byzantine faults with time complexity \(O(n \rho f)\) with high probability, where \(\rho \) is the average state reduction achieved by fusion. Finally, our evaluation of fusion on the widely used MCNC’91 benchmarks for DFSMs shows that the average state space savings in fusion (over replication) is 38 % (range 0–99 %). To demonstrate the practical use of fusion, we describe its potential application to two areas: sensor networks and the MapReduce framework. In the case of sensor networks a fusion-based solution can lead to significantly fewer sensor-nodes than a replication-based solution. For the MapReduce framework, fusion can reduce the number of map-tasks compared to replication. Hence, fusion results in considerable savings in state space and other resources such as the power needed to run the backups.     

Single-processor scheduling with time restrictions

We consider the following list scheduling problem. We are given a set \(S\) of jobs which are to be scheduled sequentially on a single processor. Each job has an associated processing time which is required for its processing. Given a particular permutation of the jobs in \(S\) , the jobs are processed in that order with each job started as soon as possible, subject only to the following constraint: For a fixed integer \(B \ge 2\) , no unit time interval \([x, x+1)\) is allowed to intersect more than \(B\) jobs for any real \(x\) . It is not surprising that this problem is NP-hard when the value \(B\) is variable (which is typical of many scheduling problems). There are several real world situations for which this restriction is natural. For example, suppose in addition to our jobs being executed sequentially on a single main processor, each job also requires the use of one of \(B\) identical subprocessors during its execution. Each time a job is completed, the subprocessor it was using requires one unit of time in order to reset itself. In this way, it is never possible for more than \(B\) jobs to be worked on during any unit interval. In this paper we carry out a classical worst-case analysis for this situation. In particular, we show that any permutation of the jobs can be processed within a factor of \(2-1/(B-1)\) of the optimum (plus an additional small constant) when \(B \ge 3\) and this factor is best possible. For the case \(B=2\) , the situation is rather different, and in this case the corresponding factor we establish is \(4/3\) (plus an additional small constant), which is also best possible. It is fairly rare that best possible bounds can be obtained for the competitive ratios of list scheduling problems of this general type.     

An integrated GA-DEA algorithm for determining the most effective maintenance policy for a k -out-of- n problem

This paper presents a novel hybrid GA-DEA algorithm in order to solve multi-objective \(k\) -out-of- \(n\) problem and determine preferred policy. The proposed algorithm maximizes overall system reliability and availability, while minimizing system cost and queue length, simultaneously. To meet these objectives, an adaptive hybrid GA-DEA algorithm is developed to identify the optimal solutions and improve computation efficiency. In order to improve computation efficiency genetic algorithm (GA) is used to simulate a series production line and find the Pareto-optimal solutions which are different values of \(k\) and \(n\) of \(k\) -out-of- \(n\) problem. Data envelopment analysis is used to find the best \(k\) and \(n\) from Genetic Algorithm’s Pareto solutions. An illustrative example is applied to show the flexibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm of this study would help managers to identify the preferred policy considering and investigating various parameters and scenarios in logical time. Also considering different objectives result in Pareto-optimal solutions that would help decision makers to select the preferred solution based on their situation and preference.     

Resource Buying Games

In resource buying games a set of players jointly buys a subset of a finite resource set \(E\) (e.g., machines, edges, or nodes in a digraph). The cost of a resource \(e\) depends on the number (or load) of players using \(e\) , and has to be paid completely by the players before it becomes available. Each player \(i\) needs at least one set of a predefined family \({\mathcal S}_i\subseteq 2^E\) to be available. Thus, resource buying games can be seen as a variant of congestion games in which the load-dependent costs of the resources can be shared arbitrarily among the players. A strategy of player \(i\) in resource buying games is a tuple consisting of one of \(i\) ’s desired configurations \(S_i\in {\mathcal S}_i\) together with a payment vector \(p_i\in {\mathbb R}^E_+\) indicating how much \(i\) is willing to contribute towards the purchase of the chosen resources. In this paper, we study the existence and computational complexity of pure Nash equilibria (PNE, for short) of resource buying games. In contrast to classical congestion games for which equilibria are guaranteed to exist, the existence of equilibria in resource buying games strongly depends on the underlying structure of the families \({\mathcal S}_i\) and the behavior of the cost functions. We show that for marginally non-increasing cost functions, matroids are exactly the right structure to consider, and that resource buying games with marginally non-decreasing cost functions always admit a PNE.