Differentially Private High-dimensional Variable Selection via Integer Programming

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Prastakos, Petros, Behdin, Kayhan, Mazumder, Rahul
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Prastakos, Petros
Behdin, Kayhan
Mazumder, Rahul
author_facet Prastakos, Petros
Behdin, Kayhan
Mazumder, Rahul
contents Sparse variable selection improves interpretability and generalization in high-dimensional learning by selecting a small subset of informative features. Recent advances in Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) have enabled solving large-scale non-private sparse regression - known as Best Subset Selection (BSS) - with millions of variables in minutes. However, extending these algorithmic advances to the setting of Differential Privacy (DP) has remained largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce two new pure differentially private estimators for sparse variable selection, levering modern MIP techniques. Our framework is general and applies broadly to problems like sparse regression or classification, and we provide theoretical support recovery guarantees in the case of BSS. Inspired by the exponential mechanism, we develop structured sampling procedures that efficiently explore the non-convex objective landscape, avoiding the exhaustive combinatorial search in the exponential mechanism. We complement our theoretical findings with extensive numerical experiments, using both least squares and hinge loss for our objective function, and demonstrate that our methods achieve state-of-the-art empirical support recovery, outperforming competing algorithms in settings with up to $p=10^4$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22062
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Differentially Private High-dimensional Variable Selection via Integer Programming
Prastakos, Petros
Behdin, Kayhan
Mazumder, Rahul
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Sparse variable selection improves interpretability and generalization in high-dimensional learning by selecting a small subset of informative features. Recent advances in Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) have enabled solving large-scale non-private sparse regression - known as Best Subset Selection (BSS) - with millions of variables in minutes. However, extending these algorithmic advances to the setting of Differential Privacy (DP) has remained largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce two new pure differentially private estimators for sparse variable selection, levering modern MIP techniques. Our framework is general and applies broadly to problems like sparse regression or classification, and we provide theoretical support recovery guarantees in the case of BSS. Inspired by the exponential mechanism, we develop structured sampling procedures that efficiently explore the non-convex objective landscape, avoiding the exhaustive combinatorial search in the exponential mechanism. We complement our theoretical findings with extensive numerical experiments, using both least squares and hinge loss for our objective function, and demonstrate that our methods achieve state-of-the-art empirical support recovery, outperforming competing algorithms in settings with up to $p=10^4$.
title Differentially Private High-dimensional Variable Selection via Integer Programming
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22062