Differential Privacy-Preserving Density Peaks Clustering Based on Shared Near Neighbors Similarity

Density peaks clustering is a novel and efficient density-based clustering algorithm. However, the problem of the sensitive information leakage and the associated security risk with the applications of clustering methods is rarely considered. To address the problem, we proposed differential privacy-preserving density peaks' clustering based on the shared near neighbors similarity method in this paper. First, the Euclidean distance and the shared near neighbors similarity were combined to define the local density of a sample, and the Laplace noise was added to the local density and the shortest distance to protect privacy. Second, the process of cluster center selection was optimized to select the initial cluster centers based on the neighborhood information. Finally, each sample was assigned to the cluster as its nearest neighbor with higher local density. The experimental results on both the UCI and synthetic datasets show that compared with other algorithms, our method more effectively protects the data privacy and improves the quality of the clustering results.