While embracing various machine learning techniques to make effective decisions in the big data era, preserving the privacy of sensitive data poses significant challenges. In this paper, we develop a privacy-preserving distributed machine learning algorithm to address this issue. Given the assumption that each data provider owns a dataset with different sample size, our goal is to learn a common classifier over the union of all the local datasets in a distributed way without leaking any sensitive information of the data samples. Such an algorithm needs to jointly consider efficient distributed learning and effective privacy preservation. In the proposed algorithm, we extend stochastic alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) in a distributed setting to do distributed learning. For preserving privacy during the iterative process, we combine differential privacy and stochastic ADMM together. In particular, we propose a novel stochastic ADMM based privacy-preserving distributed machine learning (PS-ADMM) algorithm by perturbing the updating gradients, that provide differential privacy guarantee and have a low computational cost. We theoretically demonstrate the convergence rate and utility bound of our proposed PS-ADMM under strongly convex objective. Through our experiments performed on real-world datasets, we show that PS-ADMM outperforms other differentially private ADMM algorithms under the same differential privacy guarantee.
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Evaluating Differentially Private Machine Learning in Practice
Differential privacy is a strong notion for privacy that can be used to prove formal guarantees, in terms of a privacy budget, ϵ, about how much information is leaked by a mechanism. When used in privacy-preserving machine learning, the goal is typically to limit what can be inferred from the model about individual training records. However, the calibration of the privacy budget is not well understood. Implementations of privacy-preserving machine learning often select large values of ϵ in order to get acceptable utility of the model, with little understanding of the impact of such choices on meaningful privacy. Moreover, in scenarios where iterative learning procedures are used, relaxed definitions of differential privacy are often used which appear to reduce the needed privacy budget but present poorly understood trade-offs between privacy and utility. In this paper, we quantify the impact of these choices on privacy in experiments with logistic regression and neural network models. Our main finding is that there is no way to obtain privacy for free---relaxed definitions of differential privacy that reduce the amount of noise needed to improve utility also increase the measured privacy leakage. Current mechanisms for differentially private machine learning rarely offer acceptable utility-privacy trade-offs for complex learning tasks: settings that provide limited accuracy loss provide little effective privacy, and settings that provide strong privacy result in useless models.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1717950
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10099285
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- USENIX Security Symposium
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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