Differentially private transit data publication: a case study on the montreal transportation system

With the wide deployment of smart card automated fare collection (SCAFC) systems, public transit agencies have been benefiting from huge volume of transit data, a kind of sequential data, collected every day. Yet, improper publishing and use of transit data could jeopardize passengers’ privacy. In this paper, we present our solution to transit data publication under the rigorous differential privacy model for the Société de transport de Montréal (STM). We propose an efficient data-dependent yet differentially private transit data sanitization approach based on a hybrid-granularity prefix tree structure. Moreover, as a post-processing step, we make use of the inherent consistency constraints of a prefix tree to conduct constrained inferences, which lead to better utility. Our solution not only applies to general sequential data, but also can be seamlessly extended to trajectory data. To our best knowledge, this is the first paper to introduce a practical solution for publishi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Rui Chen, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Bipin C. Desai, Nériah M. Sossou
• Keywords: Consistency Constraints, Data Mining, KDD 2012, Private Transit, Public Transit Agencies