English
Related papers

Related papers: Private Mean Estimation of Heavy-Tailed Distributi…

200 papers

We consider the problem of mean estimation under user-level local differential privacy, where $n$ users are contributing through their local pool of data samples. Previous work assume that the number of data samples is the same across…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-15 Corentin Pla , Hugo Richard , Maxime Vono

Differential Privacy (DP) is a well-established framework to quantify privacy loss incurred by any algorithm. Traditional formulations impose a uniform privacy requirement for all users, which is often inconsistent with real-world scenarios…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Syomantak Chaudhuri , Konstantin Miagkov , Thomas A. Courtade

We study the problem of estimating a functional $\theta(\mathbb P)$ of an unknown probability distribution $\mathbb P \in\mathcal P$ in which the original iid sample $X_1,\dots, X_n$ is kept private even from the statistician via an…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-05-29 Angelika Rohde , Lukas Steinberger

We consider the problem of privately estimating a parameter $\mathbb{E}[h(X_1,\dots,X_k)]$, where $X_1$, $X_2$, $\dots$, $X_k$ are i.i.d. data from some distribution and $h$ is a permutation-invariant function. Without privacy constraints,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-07-09 Kamalika Chaudhuri , Po-Ling Loh , Shourya Pandey , Purnamrita Sarkar

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

We study discrete distribution estimation under user-level local differential privacy (LDP). In user-level $\varepsilon$-LDP, each user has $m\ge1$ samples and the privacy of all $m$ samples must be preserved simultaneously. We resolve the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Jayadev Acharya , Yuhan Liu , Ziteng Sun

We study the problem of estimating finite sample confidence intervals of the mean of a normal population under the constraint of differential privacy. We consider both the known and unknown variance cases and construct differentially…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2017-11-13 Vishesh Karwa , Salil Vadhan

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

Differentially private synthetic data enables the sharing and analysis of sensitive datasets while providing rigorous privacy guarantees for individual contributors. A central challenge is to achieve strong utility guarantees for meaningful…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-06 Rundong Ding , Yiyun He , Yizhe Zhu

In this work, we study local minimax convergence estimation rates subject to $\epsilon$-differential privacy. Unlike worst-case rates, which may be conservative, algorithms that are locally minimax optimal must adapt to easy instances of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-31 Audra McMillan , Adam Smith , Jon Ullman

Differential Privacy (DP) is the current gold-standard for ensuring privacy for statistical queries. Estimation problems under DP constraints appearing in the literature have largely focused on providing equal privacy to all users. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Syomantak Chaudhuri , Thomas A. Courtade

We provide sample complexity upper bounds for agnostically learning multivariate Gaussians under the constraint of approximate differential privacy. These are the first finite sample upper bounds for general Gaussians which do not impose…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-21 Ishaq Aden-Ali , Hassan Ashtiani , Gautam Kamath

Differential privacy is a restriction on data processing algorithms that provides strong confidentiality guarantees for individual records in the data. However, research on proper statistical inference, that is, research on properly…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Joerg Drechsler , Ira Globus-Harris , Audra McMillan , Jayshree Sarathy , Adam Smith

We systematically investigate the preservation of differential privacy in functional data analysis, beginning with functional mean estimation and extending to varying coefficient model estimation. Our work introduces a distributed learning…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-11 Gengyu Xue , Zhenhua Lin , Yi Yu

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 prove new lower bounds for statistical estimation tasks under the constraint of $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-differential privacy. First, we provide tight lower bounds for private covariance estimation of Gaussian distributions. We show that…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Gautam Kamath , Argyris Mouzakis , Vikrant Singhal

We study statistical estimation under local differential privacy (LDP) when users may hold heterogeneous privacy levels and accuracy must be guaranteed with high probability. Departing from the common in-expectation analyses, and for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-15 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Alireza Fallah , Swaha Roy , Ria Stevens

We provide a differentially private algorithm for hypothesis selection. Given samples from an unknown probability distribution $P$ and a set of $m$ probability distributions $\mathcal{H}$, the goal is to output, in a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Mark Bun , Gautam Kamath , Thomas Steinke , Zhiwei Steven Wu

The Horvitz-Thompson estimate of a total can be seen as as differentially private mechanism applied to this population total. We provide forumlae to compute the $\epsilon$ and $\delta$ parameter for this specific mecanism, coupled or not…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-18 Daniel Bernard Bonnéry , Julien Jamme

Differential privacy changes the effective sample size governing CVaR learning. For tail mass $\tau$, the privacy-relevant sample size is not $n$, but $n\tau$; equivalently, the effective private tail sample size is $\epsilon n\tau$.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 El Mustapha Mansouri