Almost Instance-optimal Clipping for Summation Problems in the Shuffle Model of Differential Privacy

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Dong, Wei, Luo, Qiyao, Fanti, Giulia, Shi, Elaine, Yi, Ke
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Dong, Wei
Luo, Qiyao
Fanti, Giulia
Shi, Elaine
Yi, Ke
author_facet Dong, Wei
Luo, Qiyao
Fanti, Giulia
Shi, Elaine
Yi, Ke
contents Differentially private mechanisms achieving worst-case optimal error bounds (e.g., the classical Laplace mechanism) are well-studied in the literature. However, when typical data are far from the worst case, \emph{instance-specific} error bounds -- which depend on the largest value in the dataset -- are more meaningful. For example, consider the sum estimation problem, where each user has an integer $x_i$ from the domain $\{0,1,\dots,U\}$ and we wish to estimate $\sum_i x_i$. This has a worst-case optimal error of $O(U/\varepsilon)$, while recent work has shown that the clipping mechanism can achieve an instance-optimal error of $O(\max_i x_i \cdot \log\log U /\varepsilon)$. Under the shuffle model, known instance-optimal protocols are less communication-efficient. The clipping mechanism also works in the shuffle model, but requires two rounds: Round one finds the clipping threshold, and round two does the clipping and computes the noisy sum of the clipped data. In this paper, we show how these two seemingly sequential steps can be done simultaneously in one round using just $1+o(1)$ messages per user, while maintaining the instance-optimal error bound. We also extend our technique to the high-dimensional sum estimation problem and sparse vector aggregation (a.k.a. frequency estimation under user-level differential privacy).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_10116
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Almost Instance-optimal Clipping for Summation Problems in the Shuffle Model of Differential Privacy
Dong, Wei
Luo, Qiyao
Fanti, Giulia
Shi, Elaine
Yi, Ke
Cryptography and Security
Data Structures and Algorithms
Differentially private mechanisms achieving worst-case optimal error bounds (e.g., the classical Laplace mechanism) are well-studied in the literature. However, when typical data are far from the worst case, \emph{instance-specific} error bounds -- which depend on the largest value in the dataset -- are more meaningful. For example, consider the sum estimation problem, where each user has an integer $x_i$ from the domain $\{0,1,\dots,U\}$ and we wish to estimate $\sum_i x_i$. This has a worst-case optimal error of $O(U/\varepsilon)$, while recent work has shown that the clipping mechanism can achieve an instance-optimal error of $O(\max_i x_i \cdot \log\log U /\varepsilon)$. Under the shuffle model, known instance-optimal protocols are less communication-efficient. The clipping mechanism also works in the shuffle model, but requires two rounds: Round one finds the clipping threshold, and round two does the clipping and computes the noisy sum of the clipped data. In this paper, we show how these two seemingly sequential steps can be done simultaneously in one round using just $1+o(1)$ messages per user, while maintaining the instance-optimal error bound. We also extend our technique to the high-dimensional sum estimation problem and sparse vector aggregation (a.k.a. frequency estimation under user-level differential privacy).
title Almost Instance-optimal Clipping for Summation Problems in the Shuffle Model of Differential Privacy
topic Cryptography and Security
Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10116