Differential Privacy with Higher Utility through Non-identical Additive Noise

Differential privacy is typically ensured by perturbation with additive noise that is sampled from a known distribution. Conventionally, independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) noise samples are added to each coordinate. In this work, propose to add noise which is independent, but not identically distributed (i.n.i.d.) across the coordinates. In particular, we study the i.n.i.d. Gaussian and Laplace mechanisms and obtain the conditions under which these mechanisms guarantee privacy. The optimal choice of parameters that ensure these conditions are derived theoretically. Theoretical analyses and numerical simulations show that the i.n.i.d. mechanisms achieve higher utility for the given privacy requirements compared to their i.i.d. counterparts.