Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is important to transcriptomic analysis of gene expression. Recently, deep learning has facilitated the analysis of high-dimensional single-cell data. Unfortunately, deep learning models may leak sensitive information about users. As a result, Differential Privacy (DP) is increasingly used to protect privacy. However, existing DP methods usually perturb whole neural networks to achieve differential privacy, and hence result in great performance overheads. To address this challenge, in this paper, we take advantage of the uniqueness of the autoencoder that it outputs only the dimension-reduced vector in the middle of the network, and design a Differentially Private Deep Contrastive Autoencoder Network (DP-DCAN) by partial network perturbation for single-cell clustering. Since only partial network is added with noise, the performance improvement is obvious and twofold: one part of network is trained with less noise due to a bigger privacy budget, and the other part is trained without any noise. Experimental results of six datasets have verified that DP-DCAN is superior to the traditional DP scheme with whole network perturbation. Moreover, DP-DCAN demonstrates strong robustness to adversarial attacks. The code is available at https://github.com/LFD-byte/DP-DCAN.
Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning technique that allows model training among multiple devices or organizations without sharing data. However, while FL ensures that the raw data is not directly accessible to external adversaries, adversaries can still obtain some statistical information about the data through differential attacks. Differential Privacy (DP) has been proposed, which adds noise to the model or gradients to prevent adversaries from inferring private information from the transmitted parameters. We reconsider the framework of differential privacy federated learning in resource-constrained scenarios (privacy budget and communication resources). We analyze the convergence of federated learning with differential privacy (DPFL) on resource-constrained scenarios and propose an Adaptive Local Steps Differential Privacy Federated Learning (ALS-DPFL) algorithm. We experiment our algorithm on the FashionMNIST and Cifar-10 datasets and achieve quite good performance relative to previous work.