Quantum differentially private sparse regression learning

Differentially private (DP) learning, which aims to accurately extract patterns from the given dataset without exposing individual information, is an important subfield in machine learning and has been extensively explored. However, quantum algorithms that could preserve privacy, while outperform their classical counterparts, are still lacking. The difficulty arises from the distinct priorities in DP and quantum machine learning, i.e., the former concerns a low utility bound while the latter pursues a low runtime cost. These varied goals request that the proposed quantum DP algorithm should achieve the runtime speedup over the best known classical results while preserving the optimal utility bound. The Lasso estimator is broadly employed to tackle the high dimensional sparse linear regression tasks. The main contribution of this paper is devising a quantum DP Lasso estimator to earn the runtime speedup with the privacy preservation, i.e., the runtime complexity is $\tilde{O}(N^{3/2}\sqrt{d})$ with a nearly optimal utility bound $\tilde{O}(1/N^{2/3})$, where $N$ is the sample size and $d$ is the data dimension with $N\ll d$. Since the optimal classical (private) Lasso takes $\Omega(N+d)$ runtime, our proposal achieves quantum speedups when $N<O(d^{1/3})$. There are two key components in our algorithm. First, we extend the Frank-Wolfe algorithm from the classical Lasso to the quantum scenario, {where the proposed quantum non-private Lasso achieves a quadratic runtime speedup over the optimal classical Lasso.} Second, we develop an adaptive privacy mechanism to ensure the privacy guarantee of the non-private Lasso. Our proposal opens an avenue to design various learning tasks with both the proven runtime speedups and the privacy preservation.