PLAN: Variance-Aware Private Mean Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Aumüller, Martin, Lebeda, Christian Janos, Nelson, Boel, Pagh, Rasmus
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Aumüller, Martin
Lebeda, Christian Janos
Nelson, Boel
Pagh, Rasmus
author_facet Aumüller, Martin
Lebeda, Christian Janos
Nelson, Boel
Pagh, Rasmus
contents Differentially private mean estimation is an important building block in privacy-preserving algorithms for data analysis and machine learning. Though the trade-off between privacy and utility is well understood in the worst case, many datasets exhibit structure that could potentially be exploited to yield better algorithms. In this paper we present $\textit{Private Limit Adapted Noise}$ (PLAN), a family of differentially private algorithms for mean estimation in the setting where inputs are independently sampled from a distribution $\mathcal{D}$ over $\mathbf{R}^d$, with coordinate-wise standard deviations $\boldsymbolσ \in \mathbf{R}^d$. Similar to mean estimation under Mahalanobis distance, PLAN tailors the shape of the noise to the shape of the data, but unlike previous algorithms the privacy budget is spent non-uniformly over the coordinates. Under a concentration assumption on $\mathcal{D}$, we show how to exploit skew in the vector $\boldsymbolσ$, obtaining a (zero-concentrated) differentially private mean estimate with $\ell_2$ error proportional to $\|\boldsymbolσ\|_1$. Previous work has either not taken $\boldsymbolσ$ into account, or measured error in Mahalanobis distance $\unicode{x2013}$ in both cases resulting in $\ell_2$ error proportional to $\sqrt{d}\|\boldsymbolσ\|_2$, which can be up to a factor $\sqrt{d}$ larger. To verify the effectiveness of PLAN, we empirically evaluate accuracy on both synthetic and real world data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_08745
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PLAN: Variance-Aware Private Mean Estimation
Aumüller, Martin
Lebeda, Christian Janos
Nelson, Boel
Pagh, Rasmus
Cryptography and Security
Data Structures and Algorithms
Machine Learning
Differentially private mean estimation is an important building block in privacy-preserving algorithms for data analysis and machine learning. Though the trade-off between privacy and utility is well understood in the worst case, many datasets exhibit structure that could potentially be exploited to yield better algorithms. In this paper we present $\textit{Private Limit Adapted Noise}$ (PLAN), a family of differentially private algorithms for mean estimation in the setting where inputs are independently sampled from a distribution $\mathcal{D}$ over $\mathbf{R}^d$, with coordinate-wise standard deviations $\boldsymbolσ \in \mathbf{R}^d$. Similar to mean estimation under Mahalanobis distance, PLAN tailors the shape of the noise to the shape of the data, but unlike previous algorithms the privacy budget is spent non-uniformly over the coordinates. Under a concentration assumption on $\mathcal{D}$, we show how to exploit skew in the vector $\boldsymbolσ$, obtaining a (zero-concentrated) differentially private mean estimate with $\ell_2$ error proportional to $\|\boldsymbolσ\|_1$. Previous work has either not taken $\boldsymbolσ$ into account, or measured error in Mahalanobis distance $\unicode{x2013}$ in both cases resulting in $\ell_2$ error proportional to $\sqrt{d}\|\boldsymbolσ\|_2$, which can be up to a factor $\sqrt{d}$ larger. To verify the effectiveness of PLAN, we empirically evaluate accuracy on both synthetic and real world data.
title PLAN: Variance-Aware Private Mean Estimation
topic Cryptography and Security
Data Structures and Algorithms
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08745