Skirting Additive Error Barriers for Private Turnstile Streams

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Aamand, Anders, Chen, Justin Y., Silwal, Sandeep
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Aamand, Anders
Chen, Justin Y.
Silwal, Sandeep
author_facet Aamand, Anders
Chen, Justin Y.
Silwal, Sandeep
contents We study differentially private continual release of the number of distinct items in a turnstile stream, where items may be both inserted and deleted. A recent work of Jain, Kalemaj, Raskhodnikova, Sivakumar, and Smith (NeurIPS '23) shows that for streams of length $T$, polynomial additive error of $Ω(T^{1/4})$ is necessary, even without any space restrictions. We show that this additive error lower bound can be circumvented if the algorithm is allowed to output estimates with both additive \emph{and multiplicative} error. We give an algorithm for the continual release of the number of distinct elements with $\text{polylog} (T)$ multiplicative and $\text{polylog}(T)$ additive error. We also show a qualitatively similar phenomenon for estimating the $F_2$ moment of a turnstile stream, where we can obtain $1+o(1)$ multiplicative and $\text{polylog} (T)$ additive error. Both results can be achieved using polylogarithmic space whereas prior approaches use polynomial space. In the sublinear space regime, some multiplicative error is necessary even if privacy is not a consideration. We raise several open questions aimed at better understanding trade-offs between multiplicative and additive error in private continual release.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_10360
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Skirting Additive Error Barriers for Private Turnstile Streams
Aamand, Anders
Chen, Justin Y.
Silwal, Sandeep
Data Structures and Algorithms
Cryptography and Security
We study differentially private continual release of the number of distinct items in a turnstile stream, where items may be both inserted and deleted. A recent work of Jain, Kalemaj, Raskhodnikova, Sivakumar, and Smith (NeurIPS '23) shows that for streams of length $T$, polynomial additive error of $Ω(T^{1/4})$ is necessary, even without any space restrictions. We show that this additive error lower bound can be circumvented if the algorithm is allowed to output estimates with both additive \emph{and multiplicative} error. We give an algorithm for the continual release of the number of distinct elements with $\text{polylog} (T)$ multiplicative and $\text{polylog}(T)$ additive error. We also show a qualitatively similar phenomenon for estimating the $F_2$ moment of a turnstile stream, where we can obtain $1+o(1)$ multiplicative and $\text{polylog} (T)$ additive error. Both results can be achieved using polylogarithmic space whereas prior approaches use polynomial space. In the sublinear space regime, some multiplicative error is necessary even if privacy is not a consideration. We raise several open questions aimed at better understanding trade-offs between multiplicative and additive error in private continual release.
title Skirting Additive Error Barriers for Private Turnstile Streams
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10360