Differentially Private Matrix Completion through Low-rank Matrix Factorization

We study the matrix completion problem under joint differential privacy and develop a non-convex low-rank matrix factorization-based method for solving it. Our method comes with strong privacy and utility guarantees, has a linear convergence rate, and is more scalable than the best-known alternative (Chien et al., 2021). Our method achieves the (near) optimal sample complexity for matrix completion required by the non-private baseline and is much better than the best known result under joint differential privacy. Furthermore, we prove a tight utility guarantee that improves existing approaches and removes the impractical resampling assumption used in the literature. Numerical experiments further demonstrate the superiority of our method.