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Given a dataset of $n$ user-contributed strings, each of length at most $\ell$, a key problem is how to identify all frequent substrings while preserving each user's privacy. Recent work by Bernardini et al. (PODS'25) introduced a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Peaker Guo , Rayne Holland , Hao Wu

We give efficient protocols and matching accuracy lower bounds for frequency estimation in the local model for differential privacy. In this model, individual users randomize their data themselves, sending differentially private reports to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2015-04-21 Raef Bassily , Adam Smith

Estimating the quantiles of a large dataset is a fundamental problem in both the streaming algorithms literature and the differential privacy literature. However, all existing private mechanisms for distribution-independent quantile…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-01-11 Daniel Alabi , Omri Ben-Eliezer , Anamay Chaturvedi

In this work, we study the problem of answering $k$ queries with $(\epsilon, \delta)$-differential privacy, where each query has sensitivity one. We give an algorithm for this task that achieves an expected $\ell_\infty$ error bound of…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Badih Ghazi , Ravi Kumar , Pasin Manurangsi

We initiate the study of hypothesis selection under local differential privacy. Given samples from an unknown probability distribution $p$ and a set of $k$ probability distributions $\mathcal{Q}$, we aim to output, under the constraints of…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Sivakanth Gopi , Gautam Kamath , Janardhan Kulkarni , Aleksandar Nikolov , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Huanyu Zhang

Most of the literature on differential privacy considers the item-level case where each user has a single observation, but a growing field of interest is that of user-level privacy where each of the $n$ users holds $T$ observations and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-21 Alexander Kent , Thomas B. Berrett , Yi Yu

We develop differentially private hypothesis testing methods for the small sample regime. Given a sample $\cal D$ from a categorical distribution $p$ over some domain $\Sigma$, an explicitly described distribution $q$ over $\Sigma$, some…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-06-08 Bryan Cai , Constantinos Daskalakis , Gautam Kamath

Much of the literature on differential privacy focuses on item-level privacy, where loosely speaking, the goal is to provide privacy per item or training example. However, recently many practical applications such as federated learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-13 Yuhan Liu , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Felix Yu , Sanjiv Kumar , Michael Riley

Consider statistical learning (e.g. discrete distribution estimation) with local $\epsilon$-differential privacy, which preserves each data provider's privacy locally, we aim to optimize statistical data utility under the privacy…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-07-28 Shaowei Wang , Liusheng Huang , Pengzhan Wang , Yiwen Nie , Hongli Xu , Wei Yang , Xiang-Yang Li , Chunming Qiao

We introduce general tools for designing efficient private estimation algorithms, in the high-dimensional settings, whose statistical guarantees almost match those of the best known non-private algorithms. To illustrate our techniques, we…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Hongjie Chen , Vincent Cohen-Addad , Tommaso d'Orsi , Alessandro Epasto , Jacob Imola , David Steurer , Stefan Tiegel

Differential privacy (DP) is a rigorous notion of data privacy, used for private statistics. The canonical algorithm for differentially private mean estimation is to first clip the samples to a bounded range and then add noise to their…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-10-10 Gautam Kamath , Argyris Mouzakis , Matthew Regehr , Vikrant Singhal , Thomas Steinke , Jonathan Ullman

We study the setup where each of $n$ users holds an element from a discrete set, and the goal is to count the number of distinct elements across all users, under the constraint of $(\epsilon, \delta)$-differentially privacy: - In the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Lijie Chen , Badih Ghazi , Ravi Kumar , Pasin Manurangsi

We present differentially private algorithms for high-dimensional mean estimation. Previous private estimators on distributions over $\mathbb{R}^d$ suffer from a curse of dimensionality, as they require $\Omega(d^{1/2})$ samples to achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Yuval Dagan , Michael I. Jordan , Xuelin Yang , Lydia Zakynthinou , Nikita Zhivotovskiy

Frequency estimation, a.k.a. histograms, is a workhorse of data analysis, and as such has been thoroughly studied under differentially privacy. In particular, computing histograms in the \emph{local} model of privacy has been the focus of a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Clément L. Canonne , Abigail Gentle

This work investigates the impact of ensuring local differential privacy in the thresholding bandit problem. We consider both the fixed budget and fixed confidence settings. We propose methods that utilize private responses, obtained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Annalisa Barbara , Joseph Lazzaro , Ciara Pike-Burke

Privacy-preserving data analysis is a rising challenge in contemporary statistics, as the privacy guarantees of statistical methods are often achieved at the expense of accuracy. In this paper, we investigate the tradeoff between…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-11 T. Tony Cai , Yichen Wang , Linjun Zhang

Privacy and communication constraints are two major bottlenecks in federated learning (FL) and analytics (FA). We study the optimal accuracy of mean and frequency estimation (canonical models for FL and FA respectively) under joint…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-05 Wei-Ning Chen , Dan Song , Ayfer Ozgur , Peter Kairouz

We study the problem of Stochastic Convex Optimization (SCO) under the constraint of local Label Differential Privacy (L-LDP). In this setting, the features are considered public, but the corresponding labels are sensitive and must be…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Lynn Chua , Badih Ghazi , Ravi Kumar , Pasin Manurangsi , Ziteng Sun , Chiyuan Zhang

We consider the minimax estimation problem of a discrete distribution with support size $k$ under privacy constraints. A privatization scheme is applied to each raw sample independently, and we need to estimate the distribution of the raw…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-03 Min Ye , Alexander Barg

We present a fast, differentially private algorithm for high-dimensional covariance-aware mean estimation with nearly optimal sample complexity. Only exponential-time estimators were previously known to achieve this guarantee. Given $n$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Gavin Brown , Samuel B. Hopkins , Adam Smith