Privacy-Accuracy Trade-off in Differentially-Private Distributed Classification: A Game Theoretical Approach

Abstract

Nowadays the privacy issue arising in data mining applications has attracted much attention. In the context of distributed data mining, a major concern of the participant is that its privacy may be disclosed to other participants or a third party. To protect privacy, one can apply a differential privacy approach to perturb the data before sharing them with others, which generally causes a negative effect on the mining result. Thus there is a trade-off between privacy and the mining result. In this paper, we study a distributed classification scenario where a mediator builds a classifier based on the perturbed query results returned by a number of users. We propose a game theoretical approach to analyze how users choose their privacy budgets. Specifically, interactions among users are modeled as a game in satisfaction form. And an algorithm is proposed for users to learn the satisfaction equilibrium (SE) of the game. Experimental results demonstrate that, when the differences among users’ expectations are not significant, the proposed learning algorithm can converge to an SE, at which every user achieves a balance between the accuracy of the classifier and the preserved privacy.