Privacy-Preserving Logistic Regression Training with a Faster Gradient Variant

Logistic regression training on an encrypted dataset has been an attractive idea to security concerns for years. In this paper, we propose a faster gradient variant called Quadratic Gradient for logistic regression and implement it via a special homomorphic encryption scheme. The core of this gradient variant can be seen as an extension of the simplified fixed Hessian from Newton's method, which extracts information from the Hessian matrix into the naive gradient, and thus can be used to enhance Nesterov's accelerated gradient (NAG), Adagrad, etc. We evaluate various gradient $ascent$ methods with this gradient variant on the gene dataset provided by the 2017 iDASH competition and the image dataset from the MNIST database. Experimental results show that the enhanced methods converge faster and sometimes even to a better convergence result. We also implement the gradient variant in full batch NAG and mini-batch NAG for training a logistic regression model on a large dataset in the encrypted domain. Equipped with this gradient variant, full batch NAG and mini-batch NAG are both faster than the original ones.