Privacy Budgeting for Growing Machine Learning Datasets

Abstract

The wide deployment of machine learning (ML) models and service APIs exposes the sensitive training data to untrusted and unknown parties, such as end-users and corporations. It is important to preserve data privacy in the released ML models. An essential issue with today’s privacy-preserving ML platforms is a lack of concern on the tradeoff between data privacy and model utility: a private datablock can only be accessed a finite number of times as each access is privacy-leaking. However, it has never been interrogated whether such privacy leaked in the training brings good utility. We propose a differentially-private access control mechanism on the ML platform to assign datablocks to queries. Each datablock arrives at the platform with a privacy budget, which would be consumed at each query access. We aim to make the most use of the data under the privacy budget constraints. In practice, both datablocks and queries arrive continuously so that each access decision has to be made without knowledge about the future. Hence we propose online algorithms with a worst-case performance guarantee. Experiments on a variety of settings show our privacy budgeting scheme yields high utility on ML platforms.