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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Dick, Travis, Joseph, Matthew, Raman, Vinod
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14016
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author Dick, Travis
Joseph, Matthew
Raman, Vinod
author_facet Dick, Travis
Joseph, Matthew
Raman, Vinod
contents We study several problems in differentially private domain discovery, where each user holds a subset of items from a shared but unknown domain, and the goal is to output an informative subset of items. For set union, we show that the simple baseline Weighted Gaussian Mechanism (WGM) has a near-optimal $\ell_1$ missing mass guarantee on Zipfian data as well as a distribution-free $\ell_\infty$ missing mass guarantee. We then apply the WGM as a domain-discovery precursor for existing known-domain algorithms for private top-$k$ and $k$-hitting set and obtain new utility guarantees for their unknown domain variants. Finally, experiments demonstrate that all of our WGM-based methods are competitive with or outperform existing baselines for all three problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_14016
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Missing Mass for Differentially Private Domain Discovery
Dick, Travis
Joseph, Matthew
Raman, Vinod
Cryptography and Security
We study several problems in differentially private domain discovery, where each user holds a subset of items from a shared but unknown domain, and the goal is to output an informative subset of items. For set union, we show that the simple baseline Weighted Gaussian Mechanism (WGM) has a near-optimal $\ell_1$ missing mass guarantee on Zipfian data as well as a distribution-free $\ell_\infty$ missing mass guarantee. We then apply the WGM as a domain-discovery precursor for existing known-domain algorithms for private top-$k$ and $k$-hitting set and obtain new utility guarantees for their unknown domain variants. Finally, experiments demonstrate that all of our WGM-based methods are competitive with or outperform existing baselines for all three problems.
title Missing Mass for Differentially Private Domain Discovery
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14016