Title: Differentially Private Geodesic Regression
Primary area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations
Keywords: differential privacy, Riemannian manifolds, geodesic regression

Abstract: In statistical applications it has become increasingly common to encounter data structures that live on non-linear spaces such as manifolds. Classical linear regression, one of the most fundamental methodologies of statistical learning, captures the relationship between an independent variable and a response variable which both are assumed to live in Euclidean space. Thus, geodesic regression emerged as an extension where the response variable lives on a Riemannian manifold. The parameters of geodesic regression, as with linear regression, capture the relationship of sensitive data and hence one should consider the privacy protection practices of said parameters. We consider releasing Differentially Private (DP) parameters of geodesic regression via the K-Norm Gradient (KNG) mechanism for Riemannian manifolds. We derive theoretical bounds for the sensitivity of the parameters showing they are tied to their respective Jacobi fields and hence the curvature of the space. This corroborates recent findings of differential privacy for the Fr\'echet mean. We demonstrate the efficacy of our methodology on the sphere, $\mathbb{S}^2\subset\mathbb{R}^3$, the space of symmetric positive definite matrices, and Kendall's planar shape space. Our methodology is general to any Riemannian manifold and thus it is suitable for data in domains such as medical imaging and computer vision.

TL;DR: We develop methodology to release private estimates for geodesic regression, a generalization of linear regression parameterized by a footpoint and shooting vector.