DPpack: An R Package for Differentially Private Statistical Analysis and Machine Learning

TL;DR

DPpack is an open-source R package that offers a comprehensive toolkit for applying differential privacy to statistical analysis and machine learning, facilitating privacy-preserving data analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a versatile R package with implementations of key DP mechanisms, private statistical functions, and machine learning models, streamlining privacy-preserving analysis.

Findings

Includes implementations of Laplace, Gaussian, and exponential mechanisms.

Provides privacy-preserving statistical functions like mean, variance, and histograms.

Offers differentially private logistic regression, SVM, and linear regression.

Abstract

Differential privacy (DP) is the state-of-the-art framework for guaranteeing privacy for individuals when releasing aggregated statistics or building statistical/machine learning models from data. We develop the open-source R package DPpack that provides a large toolkit of differentially private analysis. The current version of DPpack implements three popular mechanisms for ensuring DP: Laplace, Gaussian, and exponential. Beyond that, DPpack provides a large toolkit of easily accessible privacy-preserving descriptive statistics functions. These include mean, variance, covariance, and quantiles, as well as histograms and contingency tables. Finally, DPpack provides user-friendly implementation of privacy-preserving versions of logistic regression, SVM, and linear regression, as well as differentially private hyperparameter tuning for each of these models. This extensive collection of implemented differentially private statistics and models permits hassle-free utilization of differential privacy principles in commonly performed statistical analysis. We plan to continue developing DPpack and make it more comprehensive by including more differentially private machine learning techniques, statistical modeling and inference in the future.