Period-conscious Time-series Reconstruction under Local Differential Privacy
Abstract
Periodic patterns are fundamental cues in multimedia signals and systems, including repetitive motion in video (e.g., gait cycles), rhythmic and pitch-related structure in audio, and recurring textures in image sequences. When such user-generated streams are collected from edge devices, local differential privacy (LDP) is appealing because it perturbs data before upload; however, the injected noise can corrupt spectral peaks and induce phase drift, making period estimation unreliable and degrading reconstruction quality. We propose \textbf{CPR} (\textit{Cycle and Phase Recovery}), a period-aware reconstruction framework for periodic time series under LDP. CPR performs multi-scale period probing and multi-consensus selection to suppress noise-induced spectral interference, then aggregates perturbed samples at matched within-cycle phase positions to stabilize phase alignment across cycles. To recover the underlying per-phase values, CPR combines EM-based denoising with kernel density estimation, improving robustness under tight privacy budgets. Experiments on two real-world periodic datasets demonstrate that CPR better preserves periodic structure and consistently achieves lower reconstruction error than representative LDP baselines, especially in the low- regime.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.02724,
title = {Period-conscious Time-series Reconstruction under Local Differential Privacy},
author = {Yaxuan Wang and Tianxin Li and Enji Liang and Yue Fu and Yanran Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.02724},
year = {2026}
}