A Semi-Supervised Learning Approach to Differential Privacy

Motivated by the semi-supervised model in the data mining literature, we propose a model for differentially-private learning in which private data is augmented by public data to achieve better accuracy. Our main result is a differentially private classifier with significantly improved accuracy compared to previous work. We experimentally demonstrate that such a classifier produces good prediction accuracies even in those situations where the amount of private data is fairly limited. This expands the range of useful applications of differential privacy since typical results in the differential privacy model require large private data sets to obtain good accuracy.