Conformal-DP: Differential Privacy on Riemannian Manifolds via Conformal Transformation

Differential Privacy (DP) has been established as a safeguard for private data sharing by adding perturbations to information release. Prior research on DP has extended beyond data in the flat Euclidean space and addressed data on curved manifolds, e.g., diffusion tensor MRI, social networks, or organ shape analysis, by adding perturbations along geodesic distances. However, existing manifold-aware DP methods rely on the assumption that samples are uniformly distributed across the manifold. In reality, data densities vary, leading to a biased noise imbalance across manifold regions, weakening the privacy-utility trade-offs. To address this gap, we propose a novel mechanism: Conformal-DP, utilizing conformal transformations on the Riemannian manifold to equalize local sample density and to redefine geodesic distances accordingly while preserving the intrinsic geometry of the manifold. Our theoretical analysis yields two main results. First, we prove that the conformal factor computed from local kernel-density estimates is explicitly data-density-aware; Second, under the conformal metric, the mechanism satisfies $\varepsilon$-differential privacy on any complete Riemannian manifold and admits a closed-form upper bound on the expected geodesic error that depends only on the maximal density ratio, not on global curvatureof the manifold. Our experimental results validate that the mechanism achieves high utility while providing the $\varepsilon$-DP guarantee for both homogeneous and especially heterogeneous manifold data.

@article{he2025_2504.20941,
  title={ Conformal-DP: Differential Privacy on Riemannian Manifolds via Conformal Transformation },
  author={ Peilin He and Liou Tang and M. Amin Rahimian and James Joshi },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.20941},
  year={ 2025 }
}