Enabling Data Exchange in Interactive State Estimation under Privacy Constraints

Abstract: Data collecting agents in large networks, such as the electric power system, need to share information (measurements) for estimating the system state in a distributed manner. However, privacy concerns may limit or prevent this exchange leading to a tradeoff between state estimation fidelity and privacy (referred to as competitive privacy). This paper builds upon a recent information-theoretic result (using mutual information to measure privacy and mean-squared error to measure fidelity) that quantifies the region of achievable distortion-leakage tuples in a two-agent network. The objective of this paper is to study centralized and decentralized mechanisms that can enable and sustain non-trivial data exchanges among the agents. A centralized mechanism determines the data sharing policies that optimize a network-wide objective function combining the fidelities and leakages at both agents. Using common-goal games and best-response analysis, the optimal policies allow for distributed implementation. In contrast, in the decentralized setting, repeated discounted games are shown to naturally enable data exchange without any central control nor economic incentives. The effect of repetition is modeled by a time-averaged payoff function at each agent which combines its fidelity and leakage at each interaction stage. For both approaches, it is shown that non-trivial data exchange can be sustained for specific fidelity ranges even when privacy is a limiting factor.