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We study person-level differentially private (DP) mean estimation in the case where each person holds multiple samples. DP here requires the usual notion of distributional stability when $\textit{all}$ of a person's datapoints can be…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-07-22 Sushant Agarwal , Gautam Kamath , Mahbod Majid , Argyris Mouzakis , Rose Silver , Jonathan Ullman

Recent years, local differential privacy (LDP) has been adopted by many web service providers like Google \cite{erlingsson2014rappor}, Apple \cite{apple2017privacy} and Microsoft \cite{bolin2017telemetry} to collect and analyse users' data…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Zhongzheng Xiong , Jialin Sun , Xiaojun Mao , Jian Wang , Shan Ying , Zengfeng Huang

We study the problem of discrete distribution estimation under utility-optimized local differential privacy (ULDP), which enforces local differential privacy (LDP) on sensitive data while allowing more accurate inference on non-sensitive…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Sun-Moon Yoon , Hyun-Young Park , Seung-Hyun Nam , Si-Hyeon Lee

We consider a setup in which confidential i.i.d. samples $X_1,\dotsc,X_n$ from an unknown finite-support distribution $\boldsymbol{p}$ are passed through $n$ copies of a discrete privatization channel (a.k.a. mechanism) producing outputs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-30 Adriano Pastore , Michael Gastpar

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 develop two notions of instance optimality in differential privacy, inspired by classical statistical theory: one by defining a local minimax risk and the other by considering unbiased mechanisms and analogizing the Cramer-Rao bound, and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-05-22 Hilal Asi , John C. Duchi

The maximum entropy principle is a powerful tool for solving underdetermined inverse problems. This paper considers the problem of discretizing a continuous distribution, which arises in various applied fields. We obtain the approximating…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-08-05 Ken'ichiro Tanaka , Alexis Akira Toda

Differentially private analysis of graphs is widely used for releasing statistics from sensitive graphs while still preserving user privacy. Most existing algorithms however are in a centralized privacy model, where a trusted data curator…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Jacob Imola , Takao Murakami , Kamalika Chaudhuri

We study the problem of differentially private optimization with linear constraints when the right-hand-side of the constraints depends on private data. This type of problem appears in many applications, especially resource allocation.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Andrés Muñoz Medina , Umar Syed , Sergei Vassilvitskii , Ellen Vitercik

The collection and analysis of user data drives improvements in the app and web ecosystems, but comes with risks to privacy. This paper examines discrete distribution estimation under local privacy, a setting wherein service providers can…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-16 Peter Kairouz , Keith Bonawitz , Daniel Ramage

Local Differential Privacy (LDP) addresses significant privacy concerns in sensitive data collection. In this work, we focus on numerical data collection under LDP, targeting a significant gap in the literature: existing LDP mechanisms are…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Incheol Baek , Yon Dohn Chung

We study the problem of hypothesis selection under the constraint of local differential privacy. Given a class $\mathcal{F}$ of $k$ distributions and a set of i.i.d. samples from an unknown distribution $h$, the goal of hypothesis selection…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-05 Alireza F. Pour , Hassan Ashtiani , Shahab Asoodeh

In this paper we provide a new efficient algorithm for approximately computing the profile maximum likelihood (PML) distribution, a prominent quantity in symmetric property estimation. We provide an algorithm which matches the previous best…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Nima Anari , Moses Charikar , Kirankumar Shiragur , Aaron Sidford

The problem of estimating the Kullback-Leibler divergence $D(P\|Q)$ between two unknown distributions $P$ and $Q$ is studied, under the assumption that the alphabet size $k$ of the distributions can scale to infinity. The estimation is…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-02-22 Yuheng Bu , Shaofeng Zou , Yingbin Liang , Venugopal V. Veeravalli

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

Consider statistical learning (e.g. discrete distribution estimation) with local $\epsilon$-differential privacy, which preserves each data provider's privacy locally, we aim to optimize statistical data utility under the privacy…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-07-28 Shaowei Wang , Liusheng Huang , Pengzhan Wang , Yiwen Nie , Hongli Xu , Wei Yang , Xiang-Yang Li , Chunming Qiao

We study the problem of online conditional distribution estimation with \emph{unbounded} label sets under local differential privacy. Let $\mathcal{F}$ be a distribution-valued function class with unbounded label set. We aim at estimating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Jin Sima , Changlong Wu , Olgica Milenkovic , Wojciech Szpankowski

We consider the problem of estimating the $L_1$ distance between two discrete probability measures $P$ and $Q$ from empirical data in a nonasymptotic and large alphabet setting. When $Q$ is known and one obtains $n$ samples from $P$, we…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-06-26 Jiantao Jiao , Yanjun Han , Tsachy Weissman

We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic convex optimization: the problem of minimizing the population loss given i.i.d. samples from a distribution over convex loss functions. A recent work of Bassily et al. (2019)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-12 Vitaly Feldman , Tomer Koren , Kunal Talwar

We consider the minimax estimation problem of a discrete distribution with support size $k$ under locally differential privacy constraints. A privatization scheme is applied to each raw sample independently, and we need to estimate the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-08-02 Min Ye , Alexander Barg