English

Differentially Private Histograms under Continual Observation: Streaming Selection into the Unknown

Data Structures and Algorithms 2022-01-06 v2 Cryptography and Security

Abstract

We generalize the continuous observation privacy setting from Dwork et al. '10 and Chan et al. '11 by allowing each event in a stream to be a subset of some (possibly unknown) universe of items. We design differentially private (DP) algorithms for histograms in several settings, including top-kk selection, with privacy loss that scales with polylog(T)(T), where TT is the maximum length of the input stream. We present a meta-algorithm that can use existing one-shot top-kk DP algorithms as a subroutine to continuously release private histograms from a stream. Further, we present more practical DP algorithms for two settings: 1) continuously releasing the top-kk counts from a histogram over a known domain when an event can consist of an arbitrary number of items, and 2) continuously releasing histograms over an unknown domain when an event has a limited number of items.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.16787,
  title  = {Differentially Private Histograms under Continual Observation: Streaming Selection into the Unknown},
  author = {Adrian Rivera Cardoso and Ryan Rogers},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.16787},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T00:43:06.675Z