Learning from the History: Accurately and Efficiently Aggregating Geospatial Data Under Local Differential Privacy

Aggregating geospatial data plays a crucial role in location-based services. However, collecting such sensitive data raises concerns about location privacy leakage. Local Differential Privacy (LDP), as a de facto privacy paradigm, has been widely employed to ensure individual location privacy. Nonetheless, existing approaches for aggregating geospatial data under LDP either suffer from compromised accuracy or involve complex computations. In this work, we propose a history-aware geospatial data aggregation framework to enhance both accuracy and efficiency while guaranteeing LDP. To this end, we first investigate an efficient aggregation method, namely General Randomized Response (GRR), and find that its variance of aggregation error follows the sum of two zero-mean binomial distributions. This reveals that multiple aggregations can boost the accuracy of GRR. To obtain multiple aggregations without compromising privacy, we adopt a Markov transition model to complement current aggregations from historical ones. However, learning the Markov transition matrix on perturbed data is challenging. Accordingly, we propose a privacy-aware Markov Transition Matrix Estimation (MTME) algorithm. Finally, we introduce a truth discovery-based refinement algorithm to iteratively derive an accurate aggregated result from multiple inaccurate aggregations. We evaluate our proposed method on two real-world trajectory datasets, and thorough experiments demonstrate its superior accuracy and very low time overhead compared to competitors.