MIC-DP: A Scalable Correlation-Aware Differential Privacy Framework for High-Dimensional Data

Abstract

Conventional differential privacy (DP) assumes record independence, limiting effectiveness on real-world datasets with temporal, spatial, or structural correlations. These dependencies undermine privacy guarantees and degrade utility in domains like healthcare, IoT, and smart city analytics. We propose Maximum Information Correlated Differential Privacy (MIC-DP), a novel framework that dynamically calibrates noise based on statistical dependencies. MIC-DP uses the Maximum Information Coefficient (MIC) to capture both linear and nonlinear correlations without explicit modeling, enabling adaptive sensitivity adjustment and improved privacy–utility trade-offs. Evaluations on healthcare (MIMIC), demographic (ACI), and synthetic datasets show that MIC-DP reduces mean absolute error (MAE) by up to 5.2% under strict privacy budgets (ϵ≤1), with aggregate utility improvements reaching 18% across datasets and evaluation metrics. MIC-DP provides formal (ϵ,δ)-privacy guarantees, scales efficiently with feature count, and supports deployment in moderate-scale, privacy-sensitive applications. Its tunable performance and runtime efficiency make MIC-DP suitable for privacy-sensitive applications where low-latency analytics and strong privacy guarantees must coexist. These results demonstrate MIC-DP’s effectiveness as a correlation-aware solution for practical DP.