Distributed Least-Squares Optimization Solvers with Differential Privacy

This paper studies the distributed least-squares optimization problem with differential privacy requirement of local cost functions, for which two differentially private distributed solvers are proposed. The first is established on the distributed gradient tracking algorithm, by appropriately perturbing the initial values and parameters that contain the privacy-sensitive data with Gaussian and truncated Laplacian noises, respectively. Rigorous proofs are established to show the achievable trade-off between the (, ) -differential privacy and the computation accuracy. The second solver is established on the combination of the distributed shuffling mechanism and the average consensus algorithm, which enables each agent to obtain a noisy version of parameters characterizing the global gradient. As a result, the least-squares optimization problem can be eventually solved by each agent locally in such a way that any given (, ) -differential privacy requirement can be preserved while the solution may be computed with the accuracy independent of the network size, which makes the latter more suitable for large-scale distributed least-squares problems. Numerical simulations are presented to show the effectiveness of both solvers.