A Semantic-Preserving Scheme to Trajectory Synthesis Using Differential Privacy

With the ubiquity of Internet of Things, location-based service (LBS) providers have collected huge volumes of individuals’ trajectories, which are valuable for some applications, e.g., store location choosing for merchants. However, directly publishing raw trajectories to applications may violate individuals’ data privacy and lead to unexpected loss. Although many trajectory synthesis methods under differential privacy have been proposed to privately publish trajectories data, they cannot sufficiently preserve the semantic information of trajectories. Aiming at this issue, in this article, we introduce a semantic-preserving scheme to synthesize trajectories for publishing under differential privacy. Specifically, we first design a hierarchical graphical model (HGM) to capture the semantic feature of trajectories. Then, we propose a metric, named the correlation score, to measure the relationship between two locations, which can well capture the geographic feature of trajectories. After that, we propose a private trajectory synthesis algorithm by first adding Laplace noises to the extracted features and then synthesizing trajectories based on the noisy features and the Markov chain theory. Privacy analysis demonstrates that our scheme can protect the privacy of trajectories. In addition, performance evaluation illustrates that our synthetic trajectories maintain good utility semantically and geographically.