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Bayesian Differential Privacy for Machine Learning

Machine Learning 2020-08-21 v5 Cryptography and Security Machine Learning

Abstract

Traditional differential privacy is independent of the data distribution. However, this is not well-matched with the modern machine learning context, where models are trained on specific data. As a result, achieving meaningful privacy guarantees in ML often excessively reduces accuracy. We propose Bayesian differential privacy (BDP), which takes into account the data distribution to provide more practical privacy guarantees. We also derive a general privacy accounting method under BDP, building upon the well-known moments accountant. Our experiments demonstrate that in-distribution samples in classic machine learning datasets, such as MNIST and CIFAR-10, enjoy significantly stronger privacy guarantees than postulated by DP, while models maintain high classification accuracy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1901.09697,
  title  = {Bayesian Differential Privacy for Machine Learning},
  author = {Aleksei Triastcyn and Boi Faltings},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.09697},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2020). 15 pages, 5 figures, 1 table

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:24:05.517Z