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Bayesian methods lie at the heart of modern data science and provide a powerful scaffolding for estimation in data-constrained settings and principled quantification and propagation of uncertainty. Yet in many real-world use cases where…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Sitan Chen , Jingqiu Ding , Mahbod Majid , Walter McKelvie

We construct differentially private estimators with low sample complexity that estimate the median of an arbitrary distribution over $\mathbb{R}$ satisfying very mild moment conditions. Our result stands in contrast to the surprising…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Rose Silver , Thomas Steinke , Jonathan Ullman

We provide computationally efficient, differentially private algorithms for the classical regression settings of Least Squares Fitting, Binary Regression and Linear Regression with unbounded covariates. Prior to our work, privacy…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Jason Milionis , Alkis Kalavasis , Dimitris Fotakis , Stratis Ioannidis

Gaussian copulas are widely used to estimate multivariate distributions and relationships. We present algorithms for estimating Gaussian copula correlations that ensure differential privacy. We first convert data values into sets of two-way…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-08 Shuo Wang , Joseph Feldman , Jerome P. Reiter

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 consider the classical problem of estimating the covariance matrix of a subgaussian distribution from i.i.d. samples in the novel context of coarse quantization, i.e., instead of having full knowledge of the samples, they are quantized…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Sjoerd Dirksen , Johannes Maly , Holger Rauhut

We investigate unbiased high-dimensional mean estimators in differential privacy. We consider differentially private mechanisms whose expected output equals the mean of the input dataset, for every dataset drawn from a fixed bounded…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-12-22 Aleksandar Nikolov , Haohua Tang

The increasing prevalence of high-dimensional data across various applications has raised significant privacy concerns in statistical inference. In this paper, we propose a differentially private integrated statistic for testing…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-04 Shiwei Sang , Yicheng Zeng , Xuehu Zhu , Shurong Zheng

We propose PACE-GGM, a data-adaptive differentially private method for covariance estimation that concentrates its privacy budget on the most informative entries of the empirical covariance matrix, rather than perturbing all entries. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Cecilia Ferrando , Miguel Fuentes , Brett Mullins , Cameron Musco , Daniel Sheldon

Coarse data arise when learners observe only partial information about samples; namely, a set containing the sample rather than its exact value. This occurs naturally through measurement rounding, sensor limitations, and lag in economic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Alkis Kalavasis , Anay Mehrotra , Manolis Zampetakis , Felix Zhou , Ziyu Zhu

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 prove lower bounds on the number of samples needed to privately estimate the covariance matrix of a Gaussian distribution. Our bounds match existing upper bounds in the widest known setting of parameters. Our analysis relies on the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Victor S. Portella , Nick Harvey

We propose an estimator for the mean of random variables in separable real Banach spaces using the empirical characteristic function. Assuming that the covariance operator of the random variable is bounded in a precise sense, we show that…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-11-04 Sohail Bahmani

Let $X$ be a random variable with unknown mean and finite variance. We present a new estimator of the mean of $X$ that is robust with respect to the possible presence of outliers in the sample, provides tight sub-Gaussian deviation…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-01-03 Stanislav Minsker , Mohamed Ndaoud

The goal of this paper is to show that a single robust estimator of the mean of a multivariate Gaussian distribution can enjoy five desirable properties. First, it is computationally tractable in the sense that it can be computed in a time…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-28 Arnak S. Dalalyan , Arshak Minasyan

We propose an estimator for the mean of a random vector in $\mathbb{R}^d$ that can be computed in time $O(n^4+n^2d)$ for $n$ i.i.d.~samples and that has error bounds matching the sub-Gaussian case. The only assumptions we make about the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-02-07 Yeshwanth Cherapanamjeri , Nicolas Flammarion , Peter L. Bartlett

We consider the task of privately obtaining prediction error guarantees in ordinary least-squares regression problems with Gaussian covariates (with unknown covariance structure). We provide the first sample-optimal polynomial time…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Prashanti Anderson , Ainesh Bakshi , Mahbod Majid , Stefan Tiegel

We initiate the study of differentially private (DP) estimation with access to a small amount of public data. For private estimation of d-dimensional Gaussians, we assume that the public data comes from a Gaussian that may have vanishing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-07 Alex Bie , Gautam Kamath , Vikrant Singhal

We propose and analyze a new estimator of the covariance matrix that admits strong theoretical guarantees under weak assumptions on the underlying distribution, such as existence of moments of only low order. While estimation of covariance…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-01-17 Stanislav Minsker , Xiaohan Wei

Bootstrap is a common tool for quantifying uncertainty in data analysis. However, besides additional computational costs in the application of the bootstrap on massive data, a challenging problem in bootstrap based inference under…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-05 Holger Dette , Carina Graw