Privately Estimating Black-Box Statistics

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Steinke, Günter F., Steinke, Thomas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Steinke, Günter F.
Steinke, Thomas
author_facet Steinke, Günter F.
Steinke, Thomas
contents Standard techniques for differentially private estimation, such as Laplace or Gaussian noise addition, require guaranteed bounds on the sensitivity of the estimator in question. But such sensitivity bounds are often large or simply unknown. Thus we seek differentially private methods that can be applied to arbitrary black-box functions. A handful of such techniques exist, but all are either inefficient in their use of data or require evaluating the function on exponentially many inputs. In this work we present a scheme that trades off between statistical efficiency (i.e., how much data is needed) and oracle efficiency (i.e., the number of evaluations). We also present lower bounds showing the near-optimality of our scheme.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_00322
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Privately Estimating Black-Box Statistics
Steinke, Günter F.
Steinke, Thomas
Cryptography and Security
Computational Complexity
Data Structures and Algorithms
Machine Learning
Standard techniques for differentially private estimation, such as Laplace or Gaussian noise addition, require guaranteed bounds on the sensitivity of the estimator in question. But such sensitivity bounds are often large or simply unknown. Thus we seek differentially private methods that can be applied to arbitrary black-box functions. A handful of such techniques exist, but all are either inefficient in their use of data or require evaluating the function on exponentially many inputs. In this work we present a scheme that trades off between statistical efficiency (i.e., how much data is needed) and oracle efficiency (i.e., the number of evaluations). We also present lower bounds showing the near-optimality of our scheme.
title Privately Estimating Black-Box Statistics
topic Cryptography and Security
Computational Complexity
Data Structures and Algorithms
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00322