English
Related papers

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

200 papers

We consider the problem of collaborative personalized mean estimation under a privacy constraint in an environment of several agents continuously receiving data according to arbitrary unknown agent-specific distributions. In particular, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Yauhen Yakimenka , Chung-Wei Weng , Hsuan-Yin Lin , Eirik Rosnes , Jörg Kliewer

We study the sample complexity of learning threshold functions under the constraint of differential privacy. It is assumed that each labeled example in the training data is the information of one individual and we would like to come up with…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-11-25 Haim Kaplan , Katrina Ligett , Yishay Mansour , Moni Naor , Uri Stemmer

We revisit the classical problem of nonparametric density estimation but impose local differential privacy constraints. Under such constraints, the original multivariate data $X_1,\ldots,X_n \in \mathbb{R}^d$ cannot be directly observed,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-11-15 László Györfi , Martin Kroll

In this paper we study the problem of estimating the unknown mean $\theta$ of a unit variance Gaussian distribution in a locally differentially private (LDP) way. In the high-privacy regime ($\epsilon\le 1$), we identify an optimal privacy…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-03-06 Nikita P. Kalinin , Lukas Steinberger

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 a privatised stochastic variational inference method for Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The iterative nature of stochastic variational inference presents challenges: multiple iterations are required to obtain accurate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-05 Mijung Park , James Foulds , Kamalika Chaudhuri , Max Welling

Differential privacy has become a widely accepted notion of privacy, leading to the introduction and deployment of numerous privatization mechanisms. However, ensuring the privacy guarantee is an error-prone process, both in designing…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-05-27 Xiyang Liu , Sewoong Oh

We consider the problem of identifying, from statistics, a distribution of discrete random variables $X_1,\ldots,X_n$ that is a mixture of $k$ product distributions. The best previous sample complexity for $n \in O(k)$ was $(1/\zeta)^{O(k^2…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Spencer L. Gordon , Erik Jahn , Bijan Mazaheri , Yuval Rabani , Leonard J. Schulman

We identify fundamental tradeoffs between statistical utility and privacy under local models of privacy in which data is kept private even from the statistician, providing instance-specific bounds for private estimation and learning…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-10-01 John C. Duchi , Feng Ruan

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

In modern settings of data analysis, we may be running our algorithms on datasets that are sensitive in nature. However, classical machine learning and statistical algorithms were not designed with these risks in mind, and it has been…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-08-21 Huanyu Zhang

We consider the problem of estimating the mean of a distribution supported by the $k$-dimensional probability simplex in the setting where an $\varepsilon$ fraction of observations are subject to adversarial corruption. A simple particular…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-02-04 Amir-Hossein Bateni , Arnak S. Dalalyan

The simplest and most widely applied method for guaranteeing differential privacy is to add instance-independent noise to a statistic of interest that is scaled to its global sensitivity. However, global sensitivity is a worst-case notion…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-06-10 Mark Bun , Thomas Steinke

We prove new upper and lower bounds on the sample complexity of $(\epsilon, \delta)$ differentially private algorithms for releasing approximate answers to threshold functions. A threshold function $c_x$ over a totally ordered domain $X$…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Mark Bun , Kobbi Nissim , Uri Stemmer , Salil Vadhan

We study a basic private estimation problem: each of $n$ users draws a single i.i.d. sample from an unknown Gaussian distribution, and the goal is to estimate the mean of this Gaussian distribution while satisfying local differential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Matthew Joseph , Janardhan Kulkarni , Jieming Mao , Zhiwei Steven Wu

We study mean estimation for Gaussian distributions under \textit{personalized differential privacy} (PDP), where each record has its own privacy budget. PDP is commonly considered in two variants: \textit{bounded} and \textit{unbounded}…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Wei Dong , Li Ge

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

We present two sample-efficient differentially private mean estimators for $d$-dimensional (sub)Gaussian distributions with unknown covariance. Informally, given $n \gtrsim d/\alpha^2$ samples from such a distribution with mean $\mu$ and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-27 Gavin Brown , Marco Gaboardi , Adam Smith , Jonathan Ullman , Lydia Zakynthinou

Mean estimation under differential privacy is a fundamental problem, but worst-case optimal mechanisms do not offer meaningful utility guarantees in practice when the global sensitivity is very large. Instead, various heuristics have been…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Ziyue Huang , Yuting Liang , Ke Yi

Recent research in differential privacy demonstrated that (sub)sampling can amplify the level of protection. For example, for $\epsilon$-differential privacy and simple random sampling with sampling rate $r$, the actual privacy guarantee is…

Applications · Statistics 2022-02-22 Jingchen Hu , Joerg Drechsler , Hang J. Kim