Paper detail

(Nearly) Optimal Private Linear Regression via Adaptive Clipping

We study the problem of differentially private linear regression where each data point is sampled from a fixed sub-Gaussian style distribution. We propose and analyze a one-pass mini-batch stochastic gradient descent method (DP-AMBSSGD) where points in each iteration are sampled without replacement. Noise is added for DP but the noise standard deviation is estimated online. Compared to existing $(ε, δ)$-DP techniques which have sub-optimal error bounds, DP-AMBSSGD is able to provide nearly optimal error bounds in terms of key parameters like dimensionality $d$, number of points $N$, and the standard deviation $σ$ of the noise in observations. For example, when the $d$-dimensional covariates are sampled i.i.d. from the normal distribution, then the excess error of DP-AMBSSGD due to privacy is $\frac{σ^2 d}{N}(1+\frac{d}{ε^2 N})$, i.e., the error is meaningful when number of samples $N= Ω(d \log d)$ which is the standard operative regime for linear regression. In contrast, error bounds for existing efficient methods in this setting are: $\mathcal{O}\big(\frac{d^3}{ε^2 N^2}\big)$, even for $σ=0$. That is, for constant $ε$, the existing techniques require $N=Ω(d\sqrt{d})$ to provide a non-trivial result.