Privacy-preserving logistic regression

This paper addresses the important tradeoff between privacy and learnability, when designing algorithms for learning from private databases. First we apply an idea of Dwork et al. to design a specific privacy-preserving machine learning algorithm, logistic regression. This involves bounding the sensitivity of logistic regression, and perturbing the learned classifier with noise proportional to the sensitivity. Noting that the approach of Dwork et al. has limitations when applied to other machine learning algorithms, we then present another privacy-preserving logistic regression algorithm. The algorithm is based on solving a perturbed objective, and does not depend on the sensitivity. We prove that our algorithm preserves privacy in the model due to Dwork et al., and we provide a learning performance guarantee. Our work also reveals an interesting connection between regularization and privacy.