Locally Differentially Private Frequency Estimation via Joint Randomized Response

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zheng, Ye, Seeam, Shafizur Rahman, Hu, Yidan, Zhang, Rui, Zhang, Yanchao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zheng, Ye
Seeam, Shafizur Rahman
Hu, Yidan
Zhang, Rui
Zhang, Yanchao
author_facet Zheng, Ye
Seeam, Shafizur Rahman
Hu, Yidan
Zhang, Rui
Zhang, Yanchao
contents Local Differential Privacy (LDP) has been widely recognized as a powerful tool for providing a strong theoretical guarantee of data privacy to data contributors against an untrusted data collector. Under a typical LDP scheme, each data contributor independently randomly perturbs their data before submitting them to the data collector, which in turn infers valuable statistics about the original data from received perturbed data. Common to existing LDP mechanisms is an inherent trade-off between the level of privacy protection and data utility in the sense that strong data privacy often comes at the cost of reduced data utility. Frequency estimation based on Randomized Response (RR) is a fundamental building block of many LDP mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a novel Joint Randomized Response (JRR) mechanism based on correlated data perturbations to achieve locally differentially private frequency estimation. JRR divides data contributors into disjoint groups of two members and lets those in the same group jointly perturb their binary data to improve frequency-estimation accuracy and achieve the same level of data privacy by hiding the group membership information in contrast to the classical RR mechanism. Theoretical analysis and detailed simulation studies using both real and synthetic datasets show that JRR achieves the same level of data privacy as the classical RR mechanism while improving the frequency-estimation accuracy in the overwhelming majority of the cases by up to two orders of magnitude.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_10349
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Locally Differentially Private Frequency Estimation via Joint Randomized Response
Zheng, Ye
Seeam, Shafizur Rahman
Hu, Yidan
Zhang, Rui
Zhang, Yanchao
Cryptography and Security
E.3
Local Differential Privacy (LDP) has been widely recognized as a powerful tool for providing a strong theoretical guarantee of data privacy to data contributors against an untrusted data collector. Under a typical LDP scheme, each data contributor independently randomly perturbs their data before submitting them to the data collector, which in turn infers valuable statistics about the original data from received perturbed data. Common to existing LDP mechanisms is an inherent trade-off between the level of privacy protection and data utility in the sense that strong data privacy often comes at the cost of reduced data utility. Frequency estimation based on Randomized Response (RR) is a fundamental building block of many LDP mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a novel Joint Randomized Response (JRR) mechanism based on correlated data perturbations to achieve locally differentially private frequency estimation. JRR divides data contributors into disjoint groups of two members and lets those in the same group jointly perturb their binary data to improve frequency-estimation accuracy and achieve the same level of data privacy by hiding the group membership information in contrast to the classical RR mechanism. Theoretical analysis and detailed simulation studies using both real and synthetic datasets show that JRR achieves the same level of data privacy as the classical RR mechanism while improving the frequency-estimation accuracy in the overwhelming majority of the cases by up to two orders of magnitude.
title Locally Differentially Private Frequency Estimation via Joint Randomized Response
topic Cryptography and Security
E.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10349