We consider the problem of publicly releasing a dataset for support vector
machine classification while not infringing on the privacy of data subjects
(i.e., individuals whose private information is stored in the dataset). The
dataset is systematically obfuscated using an additive noise for privacy
protection. Motivated by the Cramer-Rao bound, inverse of the trace of the
Fisher information matrix is used as a measure of the privacy. Conditions are
established for ensuring that the classifier extracted from the original
dataset and the obfuscated one are close to each other (capturing the utility).
The optimal noise distribution is determined by maximizing a weighted sum of
the measures of privacy and utility. The optimal privacy-preserving noise is
proved to achieve local differential privacy. The results are generalized to a
broader class of optimization-based supervised machine learning algorithms.
Applicability of the methodology is demonstrated on multiple datasets.