Classification with Partially Private Features
Zeyu Shen Anilesh Krishnaswamy Janardhan Kulkarni Kamesh Munagala
In this paper, we consider differentially private classification when some
features are sensitive, while the rest of the features and the label are not.
We adapt the definition of differential privacy naturally to this setting. Our
main contribution is a novel adaptation of AdaBoost that is not only provably
differentially private, but also significantly outperforms a natural benchmark
that assumes the entire data of the individual is sensitive in the experiments.
As a surprising observation, we show that boosting randomly generated
classifiers suffices to achieve high accuracy. Our approach easily adapts to
the classical setting where all the features are sensitive, providing an
alternate algorithm for differentially private linear classification with a
much simpler privacy proof and comparable or higher accuracy than
differentially private logistic regression on real-world datasets.