On the Noise-Information Separation of a Private Principal Component Analysis Scheme

In a survey disclosure model, we consider an additive noise privacy mechanism and study the trade-off between privacy guarantees and statistical utility. Privacy is approached from two different but complementary viewpoints: information and estimation theoretic. Motivated by the performance of principal component analysis, statistical utility is measured via the spectral gap of a certain covariance matrix. This formulation and its motivation rely on classical results from random matrix theory. We prove some properties of this statistical utility function and discuss a simple numerical method to evaluate it.