Towards Accurate Truth Discovery With Privacy-Preserving Over Crowdsourced Data Streams

Truth discovery endeavors to extract valuable information from multi-source data through weighted aggregation. Some studies have integrated differential privacy techniques into traditional truth discovery algorithms to protect data privacy. However, due to the neglect of outliers and limitations in budget allocation, these schemes still need improvement in the accuracy of discovery results. To solve these challenges, we propose a privacy-preserving scheme called PriPTD to achieve secure and accurate truth discovery services over crowdsourced data streams. Instead of assuming that worker weights are always stable between two neighboring timestamps, we delve deeper to consider outliers where worker weights change rapidly. Accordingly, we develop an outlier-aware weight estimation method with a time series model to capture and handle these outliers. Furthermore, to ensure data utility under a limited budget, we devise a weight-aware budget allocation algorithm. Its core idea is that timestamps with higher importance consume a larger proportion of the remaining budget. Additionally, we design a noise-aware error adjustment approach to mitigate the adverse effects of introduced noise on accuracy. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments validate our scheme. Final comparative experiments against existing works confirm that our scheme achieves more accurate truth discovery while preserving privacy.