NeurIPS 2019
Sun Dec 8th through Sat the 14th, 2019 at Vancouver Convention Center
This paper advances the state-of-the-art in differentially private Bayesian ML by proposing a private MCMC sampling scheme with wide applicability. Although the analysis follows some known ideas from the literature on private SGD, there are a number of new tricks which make the current approach interesting, most notably the observation that one can use randomized acceptance tests to preserve privacy in an MCMC algorithm. When preparing the final version of this manuscript the authors should carefully consider the points raised in the reviews regarding: clarifying where the contributions lie with respect to previous work; provide high-level intuitions of the proofs to help a reader navigate the derivations; discuss the role of approximations used in the paper, where they affect the privacy or utility of the method, and where there is some room left for improvement.