FastLloyd: Federated, Accurate, Secure, and Tunable $k$-Means Clustering with Differential Privacy

We study the problem of privacy-preserving $k$-means clustering in the horizontally federated setting. Existing federated approaches using secure computation suffer from substantial overheads and do not offer output privacy. At the same time, differentially private (DP) $k$-means algorithms either assume a trusted central curator or significantly degrade utility by adding noise in the local DP model. Naively combining the secure and central DP solutions results in a protocol with impractical overhead. Instead, our work provides enhancements to both the DP and secure computation components, resulting in a design that is faster, more private, and more accurate than previous work. By utilizing the computational DP model, we design a lightweight, secure aggregation-based approach that achieves five orders of magnitude speed-up over state-of-the-art related work. Furthermore, we not only maintain the utility of the state-of-the-art in the central model of DP, but we improve the utility further by designing a new DP clustering mechanism.

@article{diaa2025_2405.02437,
  title={ FastLloyd: Federated, Accurate, Secure, and Tunable $k$-Means Clustering with Differential Privacy },
  author={ Abdulrahman Diaa and Thomas Humphries and Florian Kerschbaum },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.02437},
  year={ 2025 }
}