Differentially private k-center problems

Abstract

Data privacy has become one of the most important concerns in the big data era. Because of its broad applications in machine learning and data analysis, many algorithms and theoretical results have been established for privacy clustering problems, such as k-means and k-median problems with privacy protection. However, there is little work on privacy protection in k-center clustering. Our research focuses on the k-center problem, its distributed variant, and the distributed k-center problem under differential privacy constraints. These problems model the concept of safeguarding the privacy of individual input elements, with the integration of differential privacy aimed at ensuring the security of individual information during data processing and analysis. We propose three approximation algorithms for these problems, respectively, and achieve a constant factor approximation ratio.