Differentially Private Naive Bayes Classification

Privacy and security concerns often prevent the sharing of users' data or even of the knowledge gained from it, thus deterring valuable information from being utilized. Privacy-preserving knowledge discovery, if done correctly, can alleviate this problem. One of the most important and widely used data mining techniques is that of classification. We consider the model where a single provider has centralized access to a dataset and would like to release a classifier while protecting privacy to the best extent possible. Recently, the model of differential privacy has been developed which provides a strong privacy guarantee even if adversaries hold arbitrary prior knowledge. In this paper, we apply this rigorous privacy model to develop a Naive Bayes classifier, which is often used as a baseline and consistently provides reasonable classification performance. We experimentally evaluate the proposed approach, and discuss how it could be potentially deployed in PaaS clouds.