722 research outputs found
Privacy-Preserving Distributed Optimization via Subspace Perturbation: A General Framework
As the modern world becomes increasingly digitized and interconnected,
distributed signal processing has proven to be effective in processing its
large volume of data. However, a main challenge limiting the broad use of
distributed signal processing techniques is the issue of privacy in handling
sensitive data. To address this privacy issue, we propose a novel yet general
subspace perturbation method for privacy-preserving distributed optimization,
which allows each node to obtain the desired solution while protecting its
private data. In particular, we show that the dual variables introduced in each
distributed optimizer will not converge in a certain subspace determined by the
graph topology. Additionally, the optimization variable is ensured to converge
to the desired solution, because it is orthogonal to this non-convergent
subspace. We therefore propose to insert noise in the non-convergent subspace
through the dual variable such that the private data are protected, and the
accuracy of the desired solution is completely unaffected. Moreover, the
proposed method is shown to be secure under two widely-used adversary models:
passive and eavesdropping. Furthermore, we consider several distributed
optimizers such as ADMM and PDMM to demonstrate the general applicability of
the proposed method. Finally, we test the performance through a set of
applications. Numerical tests indicate that the proposed method is superior to
existing methods in terms of several parameters like estimated accuracy,
privacy level, communication cost and convergence rate
Differentially Private Empirical Risk Minimization
Privacy-preserving machine learning algorithms are crucial for the
increasingly common setting in which personal data, such as medical or
financial records, are analyzed. We provide general techniques to produce
privacy-preserving approximations of classifiers learned via (regularized)
empirical risk minimization (ERM). These algorithms are private under the
-differential privacy definition due to Dwork et al. (2006). First we
apply the output perturbation ideas of Dwork et al. (2006), to ERM
classification. Then we propose a new method, objective perturbation, for
privacy-preserving machine learning algorithm design. This method entails
perturbing the objective function before optimizing over classifiers. If the
loss and regularizer satisfy certain convexity and differentiability criteria,
we prove theoretical results showing that our algorithms preserve privacy, and
provide generalization bounds for linear and nonlinear kernels. We further
present a privacy-preserving technique for tuning the parameters in general
machine learning algorithms, thereby providing end-to-end privacy guarantees
for the training process. We apply these results to produce privacy-preserving
analogues of regularized logistic regression and support vector machines. We
obtain encouraging results from evaluating their performance on real
demographic and benchmark data sets. Our results show that both theoretically
and empirically, objective perturbation is superior to the previous
state-of-the-art, output perturbation, in managing the inherent tradeoff
between privacy and learning performance.Comment: 40 pages, 7 figures, accepted to the Journal of Machine Learning
Researc
Differentially Private Convex Optimization with Piecewise Affine Objectives
Differential privacy is a recently proposed notion of privacy that provides
strong privacy guarantees without any assumptions on the adversary. The paper
studies the problem of computing a differentially private solution to convex
optimization problems whose objective function is piecewise affine. Such
problem is motivated by applications in which the affine functions that define
the objective function contain sensitive user information. We propose several
privacy preserving mechanisms and provide analysis on the trade-offs between
optimality and the level of privacy for these mechanisms. Numerical experiments
are also presented to evaluate their performance in practice
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