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Differential privacy is becoming a gold standard for privacy research; it offers a guaranteed bound on loss of privacy due to release of query results, even under worst-case assumptions. The theory of differential privacy is an active…

We study high-dimensional mean estimation in a collaborative setting where data is contributed by $N$ users in batches of size $n$. In this environment, a learner seeks to recover the mean $\mu$ of a true distribution $P$ from a collection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Vladimir Braverman , Yuhan Liu , Junze Yin

User-level privacy is important in distributed systems. Previous research primarily focuses on the central model, while the local models have received much less attention. Under the central model, user-level DP is strictly stronger than the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-28 Puning Zhao , Li Shen , Rongfei Fan , Qingming Li , Huiwen Wu , Jiafei Wu , Zhe Liu

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 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

Constructing a differentially private (DP) estimator requires deriving the maximum influence of an observation, which can be difficult in the absence of exogenous bounds on the input data or the estimator, especially in high dimensional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-27 Ryan Cumings-Menon

We investigate a problem of finding the minimum, in which each user has a real value and we want to estimate the minimum of these values under the local differential privacy constraint. We reveal that this problem is fundamentally…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-05-28 Kazuto Fukuchi , Chia-Mu Yu , Arashi Haishima , Jun Sakuma

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 revisit the problem of releasing the sample mean of bounded samples in a dataset, privately, under user-level $\varepsilon$-differential privacy (DP). We aim to derive the optimal method of preprocessing data samples, within a canonical…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-12 V. Arvind Rameshwar , Anshoo Tandon

A key challenge in many modern data analysis tasks is that user data are heterogeneous. Different users may possess vastly different numbers of data points. More importantly, it cannot be assumed that all users sample from the same…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Rachel Cummings , Vitaly Feldman , Audra McMillan , Kunal Talwar

We initiate the study of differentially private learning in the proportional dimensionality regime, in which the number of data samples $n$ and problem dimension $d$ approach infinity at rates proportional to one another, meaning that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Cynthia Dwork , Pranay Tankala , Linjun Zhang

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

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

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

In statistical learning and analysis from shared data, which is increasingly widely adopted in platforms such as federated learning and meta-learning, there are two major concerns: privacy and robustness. Each participating individual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Xiyang Liu , Weihao Kong , Sham Kakade , Sewoong Oh

We consider the problem of continually releasing an estimate of the population mean of a stream of samples that is user-level differentially private (DP). At each time instant, a user contributes a sample, and the users can arrive in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-21 Anand Jerry George , Lekshmi Ramesh , Aditya Vikram Singh , Himanshu Tyagi

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 preservation has become a critical concern in high-dimensional data analysis due to the growing prevalence of data-driven applications. Since its proposal, sliced inverse regression has emerged as a widely utilized statistical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-08 Xintao Xia , Linjun Zhang , Zhanrui Cai

Differentially private (DP) machine learning has recently become popular. The privacy loss of DP algorithms is commonly reported using $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-DP. In this paper, we propose a numerical accountant for evaluating the privacy…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-28 Antti Koskela , Joonas Jälkö , Antti Honkela

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