Cycle Counting Under Local Differential Privacy for Degeneracy-Bounded Graphs

Abstract

We propose an algorithm for counting the number of cycles under local differential privacy for degeneracy-bounded input graphs. Numerous studies have focused on counting the number of triangles under the privacy notion, demonstrating that the expected 𝓁₂-error of these algorithms is Ω(n^{1.5}), where n is the number of nodes in the graph. When parameterized by the number of cycles of length four (C₄), the best existing triangle counting algorithm has an error of O(n^{1.5} + √C₄) = O(n²). In this paper, we introduce an algorithm with an expected 𝓁₂-error of O(δ^1.5 n^0.5 + δ^0.5 d_max^0.5 n^0.5), where δ is the degeneracy and d_{max} is the maximum degree of the graph. For degeneracy-bounded graphs (δ ∈ Θ(1)) commonly found in practical social networks, our algorithm achieves an expected 𝓁₂-error of O(d_{max}^{0.5} n^{0.5}) = O(n). Our algorithm’s core idea is a precise count of triangles following a preprocessing step that approximately sorts the degree of all nodes. This approach can be extended to approximate the number of cycles of length k, maintaining a similar 𝓁₂-error, namely O(δ^{(k-2)/2} d_max^0.5 n^{(k-2)/2} + δ^{k/2} n^{(k-2)/2}) or O(d_max^0.5 n^{(k-2)/2}) = O(n^{(k-1)/2}) for degeneracy-bounded graphs.