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We study the problem of estimating mixtures of Gaussians under the constraint of differential privacy (DP). Our main result is that $\text{poly}(k,d,1/\alpha,1/\varepsilon,\log(1/\delta))$ samples are sufficient to estimate a mixture of $k$…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-24 Mohammad Afzali , Hassan Ashtiani , Christopher Liaw

Individual privacy accounting enables bounding differential privacy (DP) loss individually for each participant involved in the analysis. This can be informative as often the individual privacy losses are considerably smaller than those…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-08-25 Antti Koskela , Marlon Tobaben , Antti Honkela

We consider the problem of hypothesis testing for discrete distributions. In the standard model, where we have sample access to an underlying distribution $p$, extensive research has established optimal bounds for uniformity testing,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Piotr Indyk , Ronitt Rubinfeld , Sandeep Silwal

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

We introduce a novel framework for differentially private (DP) statistical estimation via data truncation, addressing a key challenge in DP estimation when the data support is unbounded. Traditional approaches rely on problem-specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Manolis Zampetakis , Felix Zhou

We study the optimal sample complexity of a given workload of linear queries under the constraints of differential privacy. The sample complexity of a query answering mechanism under error parameter $\alpha$ is the smallest $n$ such that…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-12-12 Assimakis Kattis , Aleksandar Nikolov

In this work, we study high-dimensional mean estimation under user-level differential privacy, and design an $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-differentially private mechanism using as few users as possible. In particular, we provide a nearly optimal…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Hossein Esfandiari , Vahab Mirrokni , Shyam Narayanan

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 the problem of learning exponential distributions under differential privacy. Given $n$ i.i.d.\ samples from $\mathrm{Exp}(\lambda)$, the goal is to privately estimate $\lambda$ so that the learned distribution is close in total…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Bar Mahpud , Or Sheffet

We present a novel method for accurately auditing the differential privacy (DP) guarantees of DP mechanisms. In particular, our solution is applicable to auditing DP guarantees of machine learning (ML) models. Previous auditing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Antti Koskela , Jafar Mohammadi

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-30 Jiayuan Ye , Vitaly Feldman , Kunal Talwar

The Gaussian distribution is widely used in mechanism design for differential privacy (DP). Thanks to its sub-Gaussian tail, it significantly reduces the chance of outliers when responding to queries. However, it can only provide…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Parastoo Sadeghi , Mehdi Korki

We present new differentially private algorithms for learning a large-margin halfspace. In contrast to previous algorithms, which are based on either differentially private simulations of the statistical query model or on private convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Huy L. Nguyen , Jonathan Ullman , Lydia Zakynthinou

Differential privacy provides a rigorous framework to quantify data privacy, and has received considerable interest recently. A randomized mechanism satisfying $(\epsilon, \delta)$-differential privacy (DP) roughly means that, except with a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-12-10 Jun Zhao , Teng Wang , Tao Bai , Kwok-Yan Lam , Zhiying Xu , Shuyu Shi , Xuebin Ren , Xinyu Yang , Yang Liu , Han Yu

This work studies anomaly detection under differential privacy (DP) with Gaussian perturbation using both statistical and information-theoretic tools. In our setting, the adversary aims to modify the content of a statistical dataset by…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Ayse Unsal , Melek Onen

We propose a numerical accountant for evaluating the tight $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-privacy loss for algorithms with discrete one dimensional output. The method is based on the privacy loss distribution formalism and it uses the recently…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-24 Antti Koskela , Joonas Jälkö , Lukas Prediger , Antti Honkela

Differential privacy (DP) provides robust privacy guarantees for statistical inference, but this can lead to unreliable results and biases in downstream applications. While several noise-aware approaches have been proposed which integrate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-29 Talal Alrawajfeh , Joonas Jälkö , Antti Honkela

We study the canonical statistical estimation problem of linear regression from $n$ i.i.d.~examples under $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy when some response variables are adversarially corrupted. We propose a variant of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Xiyang Liu , Prateek Jain , Weihao Kong , Sewoong Oh , Arun Sai Suggala

We study the problem of learning mixtures of Gaussians with approximate differential privacy. We prove that roughly $kd^2 + k^{1.5} d^{1.75} + k^2 d$ samples suffice to learn a mixture of $k$ arbitrary $d$-dimensional Gaussians up to low…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Hassan Ashtiani , Mahbod Majid , Shyam Narayanan

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