On the Optimal Number of Grids for Differentially Private Non-Interactive K-Means Clustering

Authors: Ramya Burra, Anshoo Tandon, Srishti Mittal

Differentially private K-means clustering enables releasing cluster centers derived from a dataset while protecting the privacy of the individuals. Non-interactive clustering techniques based on privatized histograms are attractive because the released data synopsis can be reused for other downstream tasks without additional privacy loss. The choice of the number of grids for discretizing the data points is crucial, as it directly controls the quantization bias and the amount of noise injected to preserve privacy. The widely adopted strategy selects a grid size that is independent of the number of clusters and also relies on empirical tuning. In this work, we revisit this choice and propose a refined grid-size selection rule derived by minimizing an upper bound on the expected deviation in the K-means objective function, leading to a more principled discretization strategy for non-interactive private clustering. Compared to prior work, our grid resolution differs both in its dependence on the number of clusters and in the scaling with dataset size and privacy budget. Extensive numerical results elucidate that the proposed strategy results in accurate clustering compared to the state-of-the-art techniques, even under tight privacy budgets.

Journal/Conference
 SPCOM 2026

This paper aims to develop an efficient open-source Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) repository, that addresses the issue of practical and scalable implementation of SMPC protocol on machines with moderate computational resources while aiming to reduce the execution time. We implement the ABY2.0 protocol for SMPC, providing developers with effective tools for building applications on the ABY 2.0 protocol. This article addresses the limitations of the C++ based MOTION2NX framework for secure neural network inference, including memory constraints and operation compatibility issues. Our enhancements include optimizing the memory usage, reducing execution time using a third-party Helper node, and enhancing efficiency while still preserving data privacy. These optimizations enable MNIST dataset inference in just 32 seconds with only 0.2 GB of RAM for a 5-layer neural network. In contrast, the previous baseline implementation required 8.03 GB of RAM and 200 seconds of execution time.

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