Data privacy is an important concern in machine learning, and is
fundamentally at odds with the task of training useful learning models, which
typically require the acquisition of large amounts of private user data. One
possible way of fulfilling the machine learning task while preserving user
privacy is to train the model on a transformed, noisy version of the data,
which does not reveal the data itself directly to the training procedure. In
this work, we analyze the privacy-utility trade-off of two such schemes for the
problem of linear regression: additive noise, and random projections. In
contrast to previous work, we consider a recently proposed notion of
differential privacy that is based on conditional mutual information (MI-DP),
which is stronger than the conventional $(\epsilon, \delta)$-differential
privacy, and use relative objective error as the utility metric. We find that
projecting the data to a lower-dimensional subspace before adding noise attains
a better trade-off in general. We also make a connection between privacy
problem and (non-coherent) SIMO, which has been extensively studied in wireless
communication, and use tools from there for the analysis. We present numerical
results demonstrating the performance of the schemes.