arXiv:2605.22756cs.LGcs.DS2026-05被引 1

通过检测树中重要节点,提升差分隐私随机森林的实用性能。

Lumberjack: Better Differentially Private Random Forests through Heavy Hitter Detection in Trees

  • 构建深决策树后,仅保留高频率节点以保隐私
  • 在真实数据集上显著优于已有隐私森林方法
  • 适合注重隐私与精度平衡的机器学习应用

随机森林广泛应用于涉及敏感表格数据的领域,但现有差分隐私(DP)方法通常导致性能大幅下降,难以实用。本文提出 Lumberjack,一种新的差分隐私随机森林算法,通过构建大型随机决策树,并对节点进行激进的隐私保护剪枝,仅保留高密度节点。其核心是针对层次化数据设计的新颖 $(ε, δ)$-DP 重频项检测算法,误差为 $O_{ε,δ}(√{\log h})$($h$ 为树高),具有独立研究价值。该优异的误差缩放特性使模型可使用远超以往的深层树结构,在隐私约束下提升表达能力。在基准数据集上的实证评估表明,Lumberjack 持续优于先前的 DP 随机森林方法,确立了新基准。尤其在实际隐私预算下,其隐私-效用权衡表现显著提升。结果表明,精心设计的差分隐私随机森林可大幅缩小效用差距,为未来研究开辟了有前景且未充分探索的方向。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Random forests are widely used in fields involving sensitive tabular data, but existing approaches to enforcing differential privacy (DP) typically degrade performance to the point of impracticality. In this paper, we introduce Lumberjack, a differentially private random forest algorithm that achieves substantially higher utility by constructing large random decision trees and then applying aggressive, privacy-preserving pruning to retain only sufficiently populated nodes. A key component of our approach is a novel $(\varepsilon,δ)$-DP heavy hitter detection algorithm for hierarchical data, whose error is $O_{\varepsilon,δ}(\sqrt{\log h})$ for trees of height $h$ and may be of independent interest. This favorable scaling enables the use of significantly deeper trees than in prior work, leading to improved expressiveness under privacy constraints. Our empirical evaluation on benchmark datasets shows that Lumberjack consistently outperforms prior DP random forest methods, establishing a new state of the art. In particular, our approach yields substantial improvements in the privacy-utility trade-off for practical privacy budgets. Our findings suggest that carefully designed DP random forests can close much of the utility gap, highlighting a promising and underexplored direction for future research.

随机森林差分隐私数据安全机器学习

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