Privacy Amplification of Iterative Algorithms via Contraction Coefficients

Abstract: We investigate the framework of privacy amplification by iteration, recently proposed by Feldman et al., from an information-theoretic lens. We demonstrate that differential privacy guarantees of iterative mappings can be determined by a direct application of contraction coefficients derived from strong data processing inequalities for $f$-divergences. In particular, by generalizing the Dobrushin's contraction coefficient for total variation distance to an $f$-divergence known as $E_{\gamma}$-divergence, we derive tighter bounds on the differential privacy parameters of the projected noisy stochastic gradient descent algorithm with hidden intermediate updates.