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We study the fundamental problem of estimating an unknown discrete distribution $p$ over $d$ symbols, given $n$ i.i.d. samples from the distribution. We are interested in minimizing the KL divergence between the true distribution and the…
Local Differential Privacy (LDP) is now widely adopted in large-scale systems to collect and analyze sensitive data while preserving users' privacy. However, almost all LDP protocols rely on a semi-trust model where users are…
Differentially private distributed mean estimation (DP-DME) is a fundamental building block in privacy-preserving federated learning, where a central server estimates the mean of $d$-dimensional vectors held by $n$ users while ensuring…
Federated heavy hitter analytics enables service providers to better understand the preferences of cross-party users by analyzing the most frequent items. As with federated learning, it faces challenges of privacy concerns, statistical…
The collection and analysis of telemetry data from users' devices is routinely performed by many software companies. Telemetry collection leads to improved user experience but poses significant risks to users' privacy. Locally…
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…
We study the fundamental task of estimating the median of an underlying distribution from a finite number of samples, under pure differential privacy constraints. We focus on distributions satisfying the minimal assumption that they have a…
Local differential privacy (LDP) provides a way for an untrusted data collector to aggregate users' data without violating their privacy. Various privacy-preserving data analysis tasks have been studied under the protection of LDP, such as…
In this paper, we study the problem of computing $U$-statistics of degree $2$, i.e., quantities that come in the form of averages over pairs of data points, in the local model of differential privacy (LDP). The class of $U$-statistics…
Conformal prediction (CP) provides sets of candidate classes with a guaranteed probability of containing the true class. However, it typically relies on a calibration set with clean labels. We address privacy-sensitive scenarios where the…
Local mutual-information privacy (LMIP) is a privacy notion that aims to quantify the reduction of uncertainty about the input data when the output of a privacy-preserving mechanism is revealed. We study the relation of LMIP with local…
We develop a theory of asymptotic efficiency in regular parametric models when data confidentiality is ensured by local differential privacy (LDP). Even though efficient parameter estimation is a classical and well-studied problem in…
This paper presents LDP-Fed, a novel federated learning system with a formal privacy guarantee using local differential privacy (LDP). Existing LDP protocols are developed primarily to ensure data privacy in the collection of single…
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…
Trajectory data collection is a common task with many applications in our daily lives. Analyzing trajectory data enables service providers to enhance their services, which ultimately benefits users. However, directly collecting trajectory…
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…
In order to remain competitive, Internet companies collect and analyse user data for the purpose of improving user experiences. Frequency estimation is a widely used statistical tool which could potentially conflict with the relevant…
We consider the estimation of a density at a fixed point under a local differential privacy constraint, where the observations are anonymised before being available for statistical inference. We propose both a privatised version of a…
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…
The rapid growth of smart devices such as phones, wearables, IoT sensors, and connected vehicles has led to an explosion of continuous time series data that offers valuable insights in healthcare, transportation, and more. However, this…