Preserving differential privacy in convolutional deep belief networks
Document Type
Article - Abstract Only
Publication Date
2017
Keywords
Deep learning, Differential privacy, Human behavior prediction, Health informatics, Image classification
Abstract
The remarkable development of deep learning in medicine and healthcare domain presents obvious privacy issues, when deep neural networks are built on users’ personal and highly sensitive data, e.g., clinical records, user profiles, biomedical images, etc. However, only a few scientific studies on preserving privacy in deep learning have been conducted. In this paper, we focus on developing a private convolutional deep belief network (pCDBN), which essentially is a convolutional deep belief network (CDBN) under differential privacy. Our main idea of enforcing ϵ -differential privacy is to leverage the functional mechanism to perturb the energy-based objective functions of traditional CDBNs, rather than their results. One key contribution of this work is that we propose the use of Chebyshev expansion to derive the approximate polynomial representation of objective functions. Our theoretical analysis shows that we can further derive the sensitivity and error bounds of the approximate polynomial representation. As a result, preserving differential privacy in CDBNs is feasible. We applied our model in a health social network, i.e., YesiWell data, and in a handwriting digit dataset, i.e., MNIST data, for human behavior prediction, human behavior classification, and handwriting digit recognition tasks. Theoretical analysis and rigorous experimental evaluations show that the pCDBN is highly effective. It significantly outperforms existing solutions.
Citation
Phan, N., Wu, X. & Dou, D. Mach Learn (2017) 106: 1681. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10994-017-5656-2
Comments
Principal Investigator: Xintao Wu
Acknowledgements: This work is supported by the NIH Grant R01GM103309 to the SMASH project. Wu is also supported by NSF Grant 1502273 and 1523115. Dou is also supported by NSF Grant 1118050. We thank Xiao Xiao and Rebeca Sacks for their contributions.