Related papers: Differential Privacy as a Causal Property

Since its introduction in 2006, differential privacy has emerged as a predominant statistical tool for quantifying data privacy in academic works. Yet despite the plethora of research and open-source utilities that have accompanied its…

Explaining artificial intelligence or machine learning models is increasingly important. To use such data-driven systems wisely we must understand how they interact with the world, including how they depend causally on data inputs. In this…

Differential privacy is a widely studied notion of privacy for various models of computation. Technically, it is based on measuring differences between probability distributions. We study $\epsilon,\delta$-differential privacy in the…

Causal discovery from observational data is a fundamental task in artificial intelligence, with far-reaching implications for decision-making, predictions, and interventions. Despite significant advances, existing methods can be broadly…

Differential privacy has emerged as the main definition for private data analysis and machine learning. The {\em global} model of differential privacy, which assumes that users trust the data collector, provides strong privacy guarantees…

We present techniques to characterize which data is important to a recommender system and which is not. Important data is data that contributes most to the accuracy of the recommendation algorithm, while less important data contributes less…

Many regulatory and analytic problems require that a prohibited variable influence a decision only through a designated allowable channel -- a conditional-independence requirement that arises in path-specific fairness, the handling of…

Differential privacy is a formal mathematical {stand-ard} for quantifying the degree of that individual privacy in a statistical database is preserved. To guarantee differential privacy, a typical method is adding random noise to the…

We explore and compare a variety of definitions for privacy and disclosure limitation in statistical estimation and data analysis, including (approximate) differential privacy, testing-based definitions of privacy, and posterior guarantees…

Data mining information about people is becoming increasingly important in the data-driven society of the 21st century. Unfortunately, sometimes there are real-world considerations that conflict with the goals of data mining; sometimes the…

Individual Differential Privacy (iDP) promises users control over their privacy, but this promise can be broken in practice. We reveal a previously overlooked vulnerability in sampling-based iDP mechanisms: while conforming to the iDP…

The guarantees of security and privacy defenses are often strengthened by relaxing the assumptions made about attackers or the context in which defenses are deployed. Such relaxations can be a highly worthwhile topic of exploration---even…

In recent years, differential privacy has emerged as the de facto standard for sharing statistics of datasets while limiting the disclosure of private information about the involved individuals. This is achieved by randomly perturbing the…

Privacy is crucial in many applications of machine learning. Legal, ethical and societal issues restrict the sharing of sensitive data making it difficult to learn from datasets that are partitioned between many parties. One important…

This paper aims at answering the following two questions in privacy-preserving data analysis and publishing: What formal privacy guarantee (if any) does $k$-anonymization provide? How to benefit from the adversary's uncertainty about the…

In the social and health sciences, researchers often make causal inferences using sensitive variables. These researchers, as well as the data holders themselves, may be ethically and perhaps legally obligated to protect the confidentiality…

Given a query result of a big database, why-provenance can be used to calculate the necessary part of this database, consisting of so-called witnesses. If this database consists of personal data, privacy protection has to prevent the…

One of the most fundamental problems in causal inference is the estimation of a causal effect when variables are confounded. This is difficult in an observational study, because one has no direct evidence that all confounders have been…

A fundamental task in science is to determine the underlying causal relations because it is the knowledge of this functional structure what leads to the correct interpretation of an effect given the apparent associations in the observed…

We propose a relaxed privacy definition called {\em random differential privacy} (RDP). Differential privacy requires that adding any new observation to a database will have small effect on the output of the data-release procedure. Random…