Differential privacy is the dominant standard for formal and quantifiable privacy and has been used in major deployments that impact millions of people. Many differentially private algorithms for query release and synthetic data contain steps that reconstruct answers to queries from answers to other queries that have been measured privately. Reconstruction is an important subproblem for such mecha- nisms to economize the privacy budget, minimize error on reconstructed answers, and allow for scalability to high-dimensional datasets. In this paper, we introduce a principled and efficient postprocessing method ReM (Residuals-to-Marginals) for reconstructing answers to marginal queries. Our method builds on recent work on efficient mechanisms for marginal query release, based on making measurements using a residual query basis that admits efficient pseudoinversion, which is an important primitive used in reconstruction. An extension GReM-LNN (Gaussian Residuals-to-Marginals with Local Non-negativity) reconstructs marginals under Gaussian noise satisfying consistency and non-negativity, which often reduces error on reconstructed answers. We demonstrate the utility of ReM and GReM-LNN by applying them to improve existing private query answering mechanisms.
more »
« less
CALM: Consistent Adaptive Local Marginal for Marginal Release under Local Differential Privacy
Marginal tables are the workhorse of capturing the correlations among a set of attributes. We consider the problem of constructing marginal tables given a set of user’s multi-dimensional data while satisfying Local Differential Privacy (LDP), a privacy notion that protects individual user’s privacy without relying on a trusted third party. Existing works on this problem perform poorly in the high-dimensional setting; even worse, some incur very expensive computational overhead. In this paper, we propose CALM, Consistent Adaptive Local Marginal, that takes advantage of the careful challenge analysis and performs consistently better than existing methods. More importantly, CALM can scale well with large data dimensions and marginal sizes. We conduct extensive experiments on several real world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CALM over existing methods.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1640374
- PAR ID:
- 10098306
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CCS '18 Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 212 to 229
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Multi-dimensional analytical (MDA) queries are often issued against a fact table with predicates on (categorical or ordinal) dimensions and aggregations on one or more measures. In this paper, we study the problem of answering MDA queries under local differential privacy (LDP). In the absence of a trusted agent, sensitive dimensions are encoded in a privacy preserving (LDP) way locally before being sent to the data collector. The data collector estimates the answers to MDA queries, based on the encoded dimensions. We propose several LDP encoders and estimation algorithms, to handle a large class of MDA queries with different types of predicates and aggregation functions. Our techniques are able to answer these queries with tight error bounds and scale well in high-dimensional settings (i.e., error is polylogarithmic in dimension sizes). We conduct experiments on real and synthetic data to verify our theoretical results, and compare our solution with marginal-estimation based solutions.more » « less
-
We study the pairwise and mutual independence testing problem for multivariate functional data. Using a basis representation of functional data, we reduce this problem to testing the independence of multivariate data, which may be high-dimensional. For pairwise independence, we apply tests based on distance and Hilbert-Schmidt covariances as well as their marginal versions, which aggregate these covariances for coordinates of random processes. In the case of mutual independence, we study asymmetric and symmetric aggregating measures of pairwise dependence. A theoretical justification of the test procedures is established. In extensive simulation studies and examples based on a real economic data set, we investigate and compare the performance of the tests in terms of size control and power. An important finding is that tests based on distance and Hilbert-Schmidt covariances are usually more powerful than their marginal versions under linear dependence, while the reverse is true under non-linear dependence.more » « less
-
Top-k frequent items detection is a fundamental task in data stream mining. Many promising solutions are proposed to improve memory efficiency while still maintaining high accuracy for detecting the Top-k items. Despite the memory efficiency concern, the users could suffer from privacy loss if participating in the task without proper protection, since their contributed local data streams may continually leak sensitive individual information. However, most existing works solely focus on addressing either the memory-efficiency problem or the privacy concerns but seldom jointly, which cannot achieve a satisfactory tradeoff between memory efficiency, privacy protection, and detection accuracy. In this paper, we present a novel framework HG-LDP to achieve accurate Top-k item detection at bounded memory expense, while providing rigorous local differential privacy (LDP) protection. Specifically, we identify two key challenges naturally arising in the task, which reveal that directly applying existing LDP techniques will lead to an inferior accuracy-privacy-memory efficiency tradeoff. Therefore, we instantiate three advanced schemes under the framework by designing novel LDP randomization methods, which address the hurdles caused by the large size of the item domain and by the limited space of the memory. We conduct comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to show that the proposed advanced schemes achieve a superior accuracy-privacy-memory efficiency tradeoff, saving 2300× memory over baseline methods when the item domain size is 41,270. Our code is anonymously open-sourced via the link.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)In the problem of domain generalization (DG), there are labeled training data sets from several related prediction problems, and the goal is to make accurate predictions on future unlabeled data sets that are not known to the learner. This problem arises in several applications where data distributions fluctuate because of environmental, technical, or other sources of variation. We introduce a formal framework for DG, and argue that it can be viewed as a kind of supervised learning problem by augmenting the original feature space with the marginal distribution of feature vectors. While our framework has several connections to conventional analysis of supervised learning algorithms, several unique aspects of DG require new methods of analysis. This work lays the learning theoretic foundations of domain generalization, building on our earlier conference paper where the problem of DG was introduced (Blanchard et al., 2011). We present two formal models of data generation, corresponding notions of risk, and distribution-free generalization error analysis. By focusing our attention on kernel methods, we also provide more quantitative results and a universally consistent algorithm. An efficient implementation is provided for this algorithm, which is experimentally compared to a pooling strategy on one synthetic and three real-world data sets. Keywords: domain generalization, generalization error bounds, Rademacher complexity, kernel methods, universal consistency, kernel approximationmore » « less
An official website of the United States government

