Related papers: Better and Simpler Lower Bounds for Differentially…
We revisit the problem of estimating the mean of a real-valued distribution, presenting a novel estimator with sub-Gaussian convergence: intuitively, "our estimator, on any distribution, is as accurate as the sample mean is for the Gaussian…
We initiate a systematic study of worst-group risk minimization under $(\epsilon, \delta)$-differential privacy (DP). The goal is to privately find a model that approximately minimizes the maximal risk across $p$ sub-populations (groups)…
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…
We study the fundamental problem of estimating the mean of a $d$-dimensional distribution with covariance $\Sigma \preccurlyeq \sigma^2 I_d$ given $n$ samples. When $d = 1$, \cite{catoni} showed an estimator with error $(1+o(1)) \cdot…
We study the fundamental task of outlier-robust mean estimation for heavy-tailed distributions in the presence of sparsity. Specifically, given a small number of corrupted samples from a high-dimensional heavy-tailed distribution whose mean…
Algorithms such as Differentially Private SGD enable training machine learning models with formal privacy guarantees. However, there is a discrepancy between the protection that such algorithms guarantee in theory and the protection they…
This paper establishes the strict optimality in precision for frequency and distribution estimation under local differential privacy (LDP). We prove that a linear estimator with a symmetric and extremal configuration, and a constant support…
The Poisson model is frequently employed to describe count data, but in a Bayesian context it leads to an analytically intractable posterior probability distribution. In this work, we analyze a variational Gaussian approximation to the…
In recent years, Gaussian noise has become a popular tool in differentially private algorithms, often replacing Laplace noise which dominated the early literature. Gaussian noise is the standard approach to $\textit{approximate}$…
Statistical tools which satisfy rigorous privacy guarantees are necessary for modern data analysis. It is well-known that robustness against contamination is linked to differential privacy. Despite this fact, using multivariate medians for…
We consider the problem of identifying the parameters of an unknown mixture of two arbitrary $d$-dimensional gaussians from a sequence of independent random samples. Our main results are upper and lower bounds giving a computationally…
We present new M-estimators of the mean and variance of real valued random variables, based on PAC-Bayes bounds. We analyze the non-asymptotic minimax properties of the deviations of those estimators for sample distributions having either a…
This work derives extremal tail bounds for the Gaussian trace estimator applied to a real symmetric matrix. We define a partial ordering on the eigenvalues, so that when a matrix has greater spectrum under this ordering, its estimator will…
We give the first polynomial-time algorithm to estimate the mean of a $d$-variate probability distribution with bounded covariance from $\tilde{O}(d)$ independent samples subject to pure differential privacy. Prior algorithms for this…
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…
We consider the problem of privately estimating a parameter $\mathbb{E}[h(X_1,\dots,X_k)]$, where $X_1$, $X_2$, $\dots$, $X_k$ are i.i.d. data from some distribution and $h$ is a permutation-invariant function. Without privacy constraints,…
Estimating the tail index parameter is one of the primal objectives in extreme value theory. For heavy-tailed distributions the Hill estimator is the most popular way to estimate the tail index parameter. Improving the Hill estimator was…
While the traditional goal of statistics is to infer population parameters, modern practice increasingly demands protection of individual privacy. One way to address this need is to adapt classical statistical procedures into…
As one of the most fundamental problems in machine learning, statistics and differential privacy, Differentially Private Stochastic Convex Optimization (DP-SCO) has been extensively studied in recent years. However, most of the previous…
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…