Privacy-Preserving Transfer Learning for Community Detection using Locally Distributed Multiple Networks

This paper develops a new spectral clustering-based method called TransNet for transfer learning in community detection of network data. Our goal is to improve the clustering performance of the target network using auxiliary source networks, which are heterogeneous, privacy-preserved, and locally stored across various sources. The edges of each locally stored network are perturbed using the randomized response mechanism to achieve differential privacy. Notably, we allow the source networks to have distinct privacy-preserving and heterogeneity levels as often desired in practice. To better utilize the information from the source networks, we propose a novel adaptive weighting method to aggregate the eigenspaces of the source networks multiplied by adaptive weights chosen to incorporate the effects of privacy and heterogeneity. We propose a regularization method that combines the weighted average eigenspace of the source networks with the eigenspace of the target network to achieve an optimal balance between them. Theoretically, we show that the adaptive weighting method enjoys the error-bound-oracle property in the sense that the error bound of the estimated eigenspace only depends on informative source networks. We also demonstrate that TransNet performs better than the estimator using only the target network and the estimator using only the weighted source networks.

@article{guo2025_2504.00890,
  title={ Privacy-Preserving Transfer Learning for Community Detection using Locally Distributed Multiple Networks },
  author={ Xiao Guo and Xuming He and Xiangyu Chang and Shujie Ma },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.00890},
  year={ 2025 }
}