English

Differentially Private Approximate Quantiles

Machine Learning 2021-10-12 v1 Cryptography and Security Data Structures and Algorithms

Abstract

In this work we study the problem of differentially private (DP) quantiles, in which given dataset XX and quantiles q1,...,qm[0,1]q_1, ..., q_m \in [0,1], we want to output mm quantile estimations which are as close as possible to the true quantiles and preserve DP. We describe a simple recursive DP algorithm, which we call ApproximateQuantiles (AQ), for this task. We give a worst case upper bound on its error, and show that its error is much lower than of previous implementations on several different datasets. Furthermore, it gets this low error while running time two orders of magnitude faster that the best previous implementation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.05429,
  title  = {Differentially Private Approximate Quantiles},
  author = {Haim Kaplan and Shachar Schnapp and Uri Stemmer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.05429},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:48:02.251Z