The Cost of Privacy in Asynchronous Differentially-Private Machine Learning

We consider training machine learning models using data located on multiple private and geographically-scattered servers with different privacy settings. Due to the distributed nature of the data, communicating with all collaborating private data owners simultaneously may prove challenging or altogether impossible. We consider differentially-private asynchronous algorithms for collaboratively training machine-learning models on multiple private datasets. The asynchronous nature of the algorithms implies that a central learner interacts with the private data owners one-on-one whenever they are available for communication without needing to aggregate query responses to construct gradients of the entire fitness function. Therefore, the algorithm efficiently scales to many data owners. We define the cost of privacy as the difference between the fitness of a privacy-preserving machine-learning model and the fitness of trained machine-learning model in the absence of privacy concerns. We demonstrate that the cost of privacy has an upper bound that is inversely proportional to the combined size of the training datasets squared and the sum of the privacy budgets squared. We validate the theoretical results with experiments on financial and medical datasets. The experiments illustrate that collaboration among more than 10 data owners with at least 10,000 records with privacy budgets greater than or equal to 1 results in a superior machine-learning model in comparison to a model trained in isolation on only one of the datasets, illustrating the value of collaboration and the cost of the privacy. The number of the collaborating datasets can be lowered if the privacy budget is higher.