Differentially-private learning of low dimensional manifolds

In this paper, we study the problem of differentially-private learning of low dimensional manifolds embedded in high dimensional spaces. The problems one faces in learning in high dimensional spaces are compounded in a differentially-private learning. We achieve the dual goals of learning the manifold while maintaining the privacy of the dataset by constructing a differentially-private data structure that adapts to the doubling dimension of the dataset. Our differentially-private manifold learning algorithm extends random projection trees of Dasgupta and Freund. A naive construction of differentially-private random projection trees could involve queries with high global sensitivity that would affect the usefulness of the trees. Instead, we present an alternate way of constructing differentially-private random projection trees that uses low sensitivity queries that are precise enough for learning the low dimensional manifolds. We prove that the size of the tree depends only on the doubling dimension of the dataset and not its extrinsic dimension. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.