Variational Bayes in Private Settings (VIPS)

Abstract

Many applications of Bayesian data analysis involve sensitive information such as personal documents or medical records, motivating methods which ensure that privacy is protected. We introduce a general privacy-preserving framework for Variational Bayes (VB), a widely used optimization-based Bayesian inference method. Our framework respects differential privacy, the gold-standard privacy criterion. The iterative nature of variational Bayes presents a challenge since iterations increase the amount of noise needed to ensure privacy. We overcome this by combining: (1) an improved composition method, called the moments accountant, and (2) the privacy amplification effect of subsampling mini-batches from large-scale data in stochastic learning. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on LDA topic models, evaluated on Wikipedia. In the full paper we extend our method to a broad class of models, including Bayesian logistic regression and sigmoid belief networks [Park et al., 2020].