PE-means: Improved Differentially Private k-means Clustering through Private Evolution

arXiv:2606.00342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of differentially private (DP) k-means clustering in Euclidean space. Previous solutions rely on summing the private data directly, which induces a sensitivity proportional to the domain. We introduce PE-means, an extension of the private evolution (PE) algorithm (an increasingly popular method for synthetic data generation), to the problem of k-means clustering. The key advantage of PE is that it only computes a private histogram with constant sensitivity to guide the evolution. Our adaptation of PE includes new evolutionary operators for clustering, as well as other algorithmic improvements of independent interest. Overall, PE-means achieves an average improvement of 20% in clustering loss over state-of-the-art baselines.

Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-06-02