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Related papers: Privately Estimating Black-Box Statistics

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We develop lower bounds for estimation under local privacy constraints---including differential privacy and its relaxations to approximate or R\'{e}nyi differential privacy---by showing an equivalence between private estimation and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-05-07 John Duchi , Ryan Rogers

Voting plays a central role in bringing crowd wisdom to collective decision making, meanwhile data privacy has been a common ethical/legal issue in eliciting preferences from individuals. This work studies the problem of aggregating…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-08-15 Shaowei Wang , Jiachun Du , Wei Yang , Xinrong Diao , Zichun Liu , Yiwen Nie , Liusheng Huang , Hongli Xu

In this paper, we consider differentially private classification when some features are sensitive, while the rest of the features and the label are not. We adapt the definition of differential privacy naturally to this setting. Our main…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Zeyu Shen , Anilesh Krishnaswamy , Janardhan Kulkarni , Kamesh Munagala

Mean estimation under differential privacy is a fundamental problem, but worst-case optimal mechanisms do not offer meaningful utility guarantees in practice when the global sensitivity is very large. Instead, various heuristics have been…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Ziyue Huang , Yuting Liang , Ke Yi

A continuing challenge for machine learning is providing methods to perform computation on data while ensuring the data remains private. In this paper we build on the provable privacy guarantees of differential privacy which has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-23 Michael Thomas Smith , Mauricio A. Alvarez , Neil D. Lawrence

Optimal state estimation for linear discrete-time systems is considered. Motivated by the literature on differential privacy, the measurements are assumed to be corrupted by Laplace noise. The optimal least mean square error estimate of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-09-02 Farhad Farokhi , Jezdimir Milosevic , Henrik Sandberg

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

We consider quantile optimization of black-box functions that are estimated with noise. We propose two new iterative three-timescale local search algorithms. The first algorithm uses an appropriately modified finite-difference-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-16 Jiaqiao Hu , Meichen Song , Michael C. Fu

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

In the highly interconnected realm of Internet of Things, exchange of sensitive information raises severe privacy concerns. The Laplace mechanism -- adding Laplace-distributed artificial noise to sensitive data -- is one of the widely used…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2015-04-09 Fragkiskos Koufogiannis , Shuo Han , George J. Pappas

The Gaussian mechanism is an essential building block used in multitude of differentially private data analysis algorithms. In this paper we revisit the Gaussian mechanism and show that the original analysis has several important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Borja Balle , Yu-Xiang Wang

We investigate differentially private estimators for individual parameters within larger parametric models. While generic private estimators exist, the estimators we provide repose on new local notions of estimand stability, and these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Hilal Asi , John C. Duchi , Kunal Talwar

Through the lens of information-theoretic reductions, we examine a reductions approach to fair optimization and learning where a black-box optimizer is used to learn a fair model for classification or regression. Quantifying the complexity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Daniel Alabi

Auditing mechanisms for differential privacy use probabilistic means to empirically estimate the privacy level of an algorithm. For private machine learning, existing auditing mechanisms are tight: the empirical privacy estimate (nearly)…

We address the problem of general function release under differential privacy, by developing a functional mechanism that applies under the weak assumptions of oracle access to target function evaluation and sensitivity. These conditions…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-12-12 Francesco Aldà , Benjamin I. P. Rubinstein

We study a class of distributed convex constrained optimization problems where a group of agents aim to minimize the sum of individual objective functions while each desires that any information about its objective function is kept private.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-09-30 Erfan Nozari , Pavankumar Tallapragada , Jorge Cortés

E-values have gained prominence as flexible tools for statistical inference and risk control, enabling anytime- and post-hoc-valid procedures under minimal assumptions. However, many real-world applications fundamentally rely on sensitive…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-22 Daniel Csillag , Diego Mesquita

We show that an "old dog", the classical discrete Laplace (aka.~geometric) mechanism, can "perform new tricks": 1. It can be post-processed to yield a simple, unbiased estimator of any subexponential function $f$ of the original data,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Quentin Hillebrand , Jacob Imola , Rasmus Pagh , Sia Sejer

We investigate the problem of learning discrete, undirected graphical models in a differentially private way. We show that the approach of releasing noisy sufficient statistics using the Laplace mechanism achieves a good trade-off between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-16 Garrett Bernstein , Ryan McKenna , Tao Sun , Daniel Sheldon , Michael Hay , Gerome Miklau

In this paper, we consider the problem of responding to a count query (or any other integer-valued queries) evaluated on a dataset containing sensitive attributes. To protect the privacy of individuals in the dataset, a standard practice is…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-07-21 Parastoo Sadeghi , Shahab Asoodeh , Flavio du Pin Calmon