Noise-Calibrated Inference from Differentially Private Sufficient Statistics in Exponential Families

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Hauptverfasser: Asiaee, Amir, Pal, Samhita
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Asiaee, Amir
Pal, Samhita
author_facet Asiaee, Amir
Pal, Samhita
contents Many differentially private (DP) data release systems either output DP synthetic data and leave analysts to perform inference as usual, which can lead to severe miscalibration, or output a DP point estimate without a principled way to do uncertainty quantification. This paper develops a clean and tractable middle ground for exponential families: release only DP sufficient statistics, then perform noise-calibrated likelihood-based inference and optional parametric synthetic data generation as post-processing. Our contributions are: (1) a general recipe for approximate-DP release of clipped sufficient statistics under the Gaussian mechanism; (2) asymptotic normality, explicit variance inflation, and valid Wald-style confidence intervals for the plug-in DP MLE; (3) a noise-aware likelihood correction that is first-order equivalent to the plug-in but supports bootstrap-based intervals; and (4) a matching minimax lower bound showing the privacy distortion rate is unavoidable. The resulting theory yields concrete design rules and a practical pipeline for releasing DP synthetic data with principled uncertainty quantification, validated on three exponential families and real census data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02010
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Noise-Calibrated Inference from Differentially Private Sufficient Statistics in Exponential Families
Asiaee, Amir
Pal, Samhita
Machine Learning
Many differentially private (DP) data release systems either output DP synthetic data and leave analysts to perform inference as usual, which can lead to severe miscalibration, or output a DP point estimate without a principled way to do uncertainty quantification. This paper develops a clean and tractable middle ground for exponential families: release only DP sufficient statistics, then perform noise-calibrated likelihood-based inference and optional parametric synthetic data generation as post-processing. Our contributions are: (1) a general recipe for approximate-DP release of clipped sufficient statistics under the Gaussian mechanism; (2) asymptotic normality, explicit variance inflation, and valid Wald-style confidence intervals for the plug-in DP MLE; (3) a noise-aware likelihood correction that is first-order equivalent to the plug-in but supports bootstrap-based intervals; and (4) a matching minimax lower bound showing the privacy distortion rate is unavoidable. The resulting theory yields concrete design rules and a practical pipeline for releasing DP synthetic data with principled uncertainty quantification, validated on three exponential families and real census data.
title Noise-Calibrated Inference from Differentially Private Sufficient Statistics in Exponential Families
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02010