Approximation of Pufferfish Privacy for Gaussian Priors

Abstract

This paper studies how to approximate pufferfish privacy when the adversary's prior belief of the published data is Gaussian distributed. Using Monge's optimal transport plan, we show that $(\epsilon, \delta)$-pufferfish privacy is attained if the additive Laplace noise is calibrated to the differences in mean and variance of the Gaussian distributions conditioned on every discriminative secret pair. A typical application is the private release of the summation (or average) query, for which sufficient conditions are derived for approximating $\epsilon$-statistical indistinguishability in individual's sensitive data. The result is then extended to arbitrary prior beliefs trained by Gaussian mixture models (GMMs): calibrating Laplace noise to a convex combination of differences in mean and variance between Gaussian components attains $(\epsilon,\delta)$-pufferfish privacy.