Releasing Graph Neural Networks with Differential Privacy Guarantees

Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2023 With the increasing popularity of graph neural networks (GNNs) in several sensitive applications like healthcare and medicine, concerns have been raised over the privacy aspects of trained GNNs. More notably, GNNs are vulnerable to privacy attacks, such as membership inference attacks, even if only black-box access to the trained model is granted. We propose PrivGNN, a privacy-preserving framework for releasing GNN models in a centralized setting. Assuming an access to a public unlabeled graph, PrivGNN provides a framework to release GNN models trained explicitly on public data along with knowledge obtained from the private data in a privacy preserving manner. PrivGNN combines the knowledge-distillation framework with the two noise mechanisms, random subsampling, and noisy labeling, to ensure rigorous privacy guarantees. We theoretically analyze our approach in the Renyi differential privacy framework. Besides, we show the solid experimental performance of our method compared to several baselines adapted for graph-structured data. Our code is available at https://github.com/iyempissy/privGnn.