Enhancing Utility in the Watchdog Privacy Mechanism

Abstract

This paper is concerned with enhancing data utility in the privacy watchdog method for attaining information-theoretic privacy. For a specific privacy constraint, the watchdog method filters out the high-risk data symbols through applying a uniform data regulation scheme, e.g., merging all high-risk symbols together. While this method entirely trades the symbols resolution off for privacy, we show that the data utility can be greatly improved by partitioning the high-risk symbols set and individually privatizing each subset. We further propose an agglomerative merging algorithm that finds a suitable partition of high-risk symbols: it starts with a singleton high-risk symbol, which is iteratively fused with others until the resulting subsets are private.~Numerical simulations demonstrate the efficacy of this algorithm in privately achieving higher utilities in the watchdog scheme.