Differentially Private Substring and Document Counting with Near-Optimal Error

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Main Authors: Bernardini, Giulia, Bille, Philip, Gørtz, Inge Li, Steiner, Teresa Anna
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Bernardini, Giulia
Bille, Philip
Gørtz, Inge Li
Steiner, Teresa Anna
author_facet Bernardini, Giulia
Bille, Philip
Gørtz, Inge Li
Steiner, Teresa Anna
contents For databases consisting of many text documents, one of the most fundamental data analysis tasks is counting (i) how often a pattern appears as a substring in the database (substring counting) and (ii) how many documents in the collection contain the pattern as a substring (document counting). If such a database contains sensitive data, it is crucial to protect the privacy of individuals in the database. Differential privacy is the gold standard for privacy in data analysis. It gives rigorous privacy guarantees, but comes at the cost of yielding less accurate results. In this paper, we carry out a theoretical study of substring and document counting under differential privacy. We propose a data structure storing $ε$-differentially private counts for all possible query patterns with a maximum additive error of $O(\ell\cdot\mathrm{polylog}(n\ell|Σ|))$, where $\ell$ is the maximum length of a document in the database, $n$ is the number of documents, and $|Σ|$ is the size of the alphabet. We also improve the error bound for document counting with $(ε, δ)$-differential privacy to $O(\sqrt{\ell}\cdot\mathrm{polylog}(n\ell|Σ|))$. We show that our additive errors for substring counting and document counting are optimal up to an $O(\mathrm{polylog}(n\ell))$ factor both for $ε$-differential privacy and $(ε, δ)$-differential privacy. Our data structures immediately lead to improved algorithms for related problems, such as privately mining frequent substrings and q-grams. Additionally, we develop a new technique of independent interest for differentially privately computing a general class of counting functions on trees.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_13813
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Differentially Private Substring and Document Counting with Near-Optimal Error
Bernardini, Giulia
Bille, Philip
Gørtz, Inge Li
Steiner, Teresa Anna
Data Structures and Algorithms
Cryptography and Security
For databases consisting of many text documents, one of the most fundamental data analysis tasks is counting (i) how often a pattern appears as a substring in the database (substring counting) and (ii) how many documents in the collection contain the pattern as a substring (document counting). If such a database contains sensitive data, it is crucial to protect the privacy of individuals in the database. Differential privacy is the gold standard for privacy in data analysis. It gives rigorous privacy guarantees, but comes at the cost of yielding less accurate results. In this paper, we carry out a theoretical study of substring and document counting under differential privacy. We propose a data structure storing $ε$-differentially private counts for all possible query patterns with a maximum additive error of $O(\ell\cdot\mathrm{polylog}(n\ell|Σ|))$, where $\ell$ is the maximum length of a document in the database, $n$ is the number of documents, and $|Σ|$ is the size of the alphabet. We also improve the error bound for document counting with $(ε, δ)$-differential privacy to $O(\sqrt{\ell}\cdot\mathrm{polylog}(n\ell|Σ|))$. We show that our additive errors for substring counting and document counting are optimal up to an $O(\mathrm{polylog}(n\ell))$ factor both for $ε$-differential privacy and $(ε, δ)$-differential privacy. Our data structures immediately lead to improved algorithms for related problems, such as privately mining frequent substrings and q-grams. Additionally, we develop a new technique of independent interest for differentially privately computing a general class of counting functions on trees.
title Differentially Private Substring and Document Counting with Near-Optimal Error
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13813