Statistical methods protecting sensitive information or the identity of the data owner have become critical to ensure privacy of individuals as well as of organizations. This paper investigates anonymization methods based on representation learning and deep neural networks, and motivated by novel information theoretical bounds. We introduce a novel training objective for simultaneously training a predictor over target variables of interest (the regular labels) while preventing an intermediate representation to be predictive of the private labels. The architecture is based on three sub-networks: one going from input to representation, one from representation to predicted regular labels, and one from representation to predicted private labels. The training procedure aims at learning representations that preserve the relevant part of the information (about regular labels) while dismissing information about the private labels which correspond to the identity of a person. We demonstrate the success of this approach for two distinct classification versus anonymization tasks (handwritten digits and sentiment analysis).
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 e-differential privacy definition due to (2006). First we apply the output perturbation ideas of (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. Machine learning techniques based on neural networks are achieving remarkable results in a wide variety of domains. Often, the training of models requires large, representative datasets, which may be crowdsourced and contain sensitive information. The models should not expose private information in these datasets. Addressing this goal, we develop new algorithmic techniques for learning and a refined analysis of privacy costs within the framework of differential privacy. Our implementation and experiments demonstrate that we can train deep neural networks with non-convex objectives, under a modest privacy budget, and at a manageable cost in software complexity, training efficiency, and model quality. We study statistical risk minimization problems under a privacy model in which the data is kept confidential even from the learner. In this local privacy framework, we establish sharp upper and lower bounds on the convergence rates of statistical estimation procedures. As a consequence, we exhibit a precise tradeoff between the amount of privacy the data preserves and the utility, as measured by convergence rate, of any statistical estimator or learning procedure. With the development of distributed computing environment , many learning problems now have to deal with distributed input data. To enhance cooperations in learning, it is important to address the privacy concern of each data holder by extending the privacy preservation notion to original learning algorithms. In this paper, we focus on preserving the privacy in an important learning model, multilayer neural networks. We present a privacy-preserving two-party distributed algorithm of backpropagation which allows a neural network to be trained without requiring either party to reveal her data to the other. We provide complete correctness and security analysis of our algorithms. The effectiveness of our algorithms is verified by experiments on various real world data sets. Over the past five years a new approach to privacy-preserving data analysis has born fruit [13, 18, 7, 19, 5, 37, 35, 8, 32]. This approach differs from much (but not all!) of the related literature in the statistics, databases, theory, and cryptography communities, in that a formal and ad omnia privacy guarantee is defined, and the data analysis techniques presented are rigorously proved to satisfy the guarantee. The key privacy guarantee that has emerged is differential privacy. Roughly speaking, this ensures that (almost, and quantifiably) no risk is incurred by joining a statistical database. In this survey, we recall the definition of differential privacy and two basic techniques for achieving it. We then show some interesting applications of these techniques, presenting algorithms for three specific tasks and three general results on differentially private learning. One goal of statistical privacy research is to construct a data release mechanism that protects individual privacy while preserving information content. An example is a random mechanism that takes an input database X and outputs a random database Z according to a distribution Qn(⋅|X). Differential privacy is a particular privacy requirement developed by computer scientists in which Qn(⋅|X) is required to be insensitive to changes in one data point in X. This makes it difficult to infer from Z whether a given individual is in the original database X. We consider differential privacy from a statistical perspective. We consider several data-release mechanisms that satisfy the differential privacy requirement. We show that it is useful to compare these schemes by computing the rate of convergence of distributions and densities constructed from the released data. We study a general privacy method, called the exponential mechanism, introduced by McSherry and Talwar (2007). We show that the accuracy of this meth... While machine learning has proven to be a powerful data-driven solution to many real-life problems, its use in sensitive domains has been limited due to privacy concerns. A popular approach known as differential privacy offers provable privacy guarantees, but it is often observed in practice that it could substantially hamper learning accuracy. In this paper we study the learnability (whether a problem can be learned by any algorithm) under Vapnik's general learning setting with differential privacy constraint, and reveal some intricate relationships between privacy, stability and learnability. In particular, we show that a problem is privately learnable if an only if there is a private algorithm that asymptotically minimizes the empirical risk (AERM). In contrast, for non-private learning AERM alone is not sufficient for learnability. This result suggests that when searching for private learning algorithms, we can restrict the search to algorithms that are AERM. In light of this, we propose a conceptual procedure that always finds a universally consistent algorithm whenever the problem is learnable under privacy constraint. We also propose a generic and practical algorithm and show that under very general conditions it privately learns a wide class of learning problems. Lastly, we extend some of the results to the more practical (e, δ)-differential privacy and establish the existence of a phase-transition on the class of problems that are approximately privately learnable with respect to how small δ needs to be.  To improve the accuracy of learning result, in practice multiple parties may collaborate through conducting joint Back-Propagation neural network learning on the union of their respective data sets. During this process no party wants to disclose her his private data to others. Existing schemes supporting this kind of collaborative learning are either limited in the way of data partition or just consider two parties. There lacks a solution that allows two or more parties, each with an arbitrarily partitioned data set, to collaboratively conduct the learning. This paper solves this open problem by utilizing the power of cloud computing. In our proposed scheme, each party encrypts his her private data locally and uploads the ciphertexts into the cloud. The cloud then executes most of the operations pertaining to the learning algorithms over ciphertexts without knowing the original private data. By securely offloading the expensive operations to the cloud, we keep the computation and communication costs on each party minimal and independent to the number of participants. To support flexible operations over ciphertexts, we adopt and tailor the BGN "doubly homomorphic" encryption algorithm for the multiparty setting. Numerical analysis and experiments on commodity cloud show that our scheme is secure, efficient, and accurate. Convex empirical risk minimization is a basic tool in machine learning and statistics. We provide new algorithms and matching lower bounds for differentially private convex empirical risk minimization assuming only that each data point's contribution to the loss function is Lipschitz and that the domain of optimization is bounded. We provide a separate set of algorithms and matching lower bounds for the setting in which the loss functions are known to also be strongly convex.Our algorithms run in polynomial time, and in some cases even match the optimal non-private running time (as measured by oracle complexity). We give separate algorithms (and lower bounds) for (aepsi;, 0)- and (aepsi;,a#x03B4;)-differential privacy, perhaps surprisingly, the techniques used for designing optimal algorithms in the two cases are completely different. Our lower bounds apply even to very simple, smooth function families, such as linear and quadratic functions. This implies that algorithms from previous work can be used to obtain optimal error rates, under the additional assumption that the contributions of each data point to the loss function is smooth. We show that simple approaches to smoothing arbitrary loss functions (in order to apply previous techniques) do not yield optimal error rates. In particular, optimal algorithms were not previously known for problems such as training support vector machines and the high-dimensional median.