Private Exploration Primitives for Data Cleaning.
Chang Ge, Ihab F. Ilyas, Xi Qin He, Ashwin Machanavajjhala · 2017
Data cleaning, or the process of detecting and repairing inaccurate or corrupt records in the data, is inherently human-driven. State of the art systems assume cleaning experts can access the data (or a sample of it) to tune the cleaning process. However, in many cases, privacy constraints disallow unfettered access to the data. To address this challenge, we observe and provide empirical evidence that data cleaning can be achieved without access to the sensitive data, but with access to a (noisy) query interface that supports a small set of linear counting query primitives. Motivated by this, we present DPClean, a first of a kind system that allows engineers tune data cleaning workflows while ensuring differential privacy. In DPClean, a cleaning engineer can pose sequences of aggregate counting queries with error tolerances. A privacy engine translates each query into a differentially private mechanism that returns an answer with error matching the specified tolerance, and allows the data owner track the overall privacy loss. With extensive experiments using human and simulated cleaning engineers on blocking and matching tasks, we demonstrate that our approach is able to achieve high cleaning quality while ensuring a reasonable privacy loss.