INSPECTRE: Privately Estimating the Unseen

Abstract

We develop differentially private methods for estimating various distributional properties. Given a sample from a discrete distribution p, some functional f, and accuracy and privacy parameters alpha and epsilon, the goal is to estimate f(p) up to accuracy alpha, while maintaining epsilon-differential privacy of the sample. We prove almost-tight bounds on the sample size required for this problem for several functionals of interest, including support size, support coverage, and entropy. We show that the cost of privacy is negligible in a variety of settings, both theoretically and experimentally. Our methods are based on a sensitivity analysis of several state-of-the-art methods for estimating these properties with sublinear sample complexities

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jun 05, 2020
Source ID
10.29012/jpc.724

Entities

People

  • Gautam Kamath
  • Huanyu Zhang
  • Jayadev Acharya
  • Ziteng Sun

Organizations

  • National Science Foundation
  • Office of Naval Research

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Mathematics

Readers

  • Life Cycle Cost Analysis
  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.
  • Theoretical Analysis.