Private Quantiles Estimation in the Presence of Atoms
We consider the differentially private estimation of multiple quantiles (MQ) of a distribution from a dataset, a key building block in modern data analysis. We apply the recent non-smoothed Inverse Sensitivity (IS) mechanism to this specific problem. We establish that the resulting method is closely related to the recently published ad hoc algorithm JointExp. In particular, they share the same computational complexity and a similar efficiency. We prove the statistical consistency of these two algorithms for continuous distributions. Furthermore, we demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that this method suffers from an important lack of performance in the case of peaked distributions, which can degrade up to a potentially catastrophic impact in the presence of atoms. Its smoothed version (i.e. by applying a max kernel to its output density) would solve this problem, but remains an open challenge to implement. As a proxy, we propose a simple and numerically efficient method called Heuristically Smoothed JointExp (HSJointExp), which is endowed with performance guarantees for a broad class of distributions and achieves results that are orders of magnitude better on problematic datasets.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Methods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Private Statistical Estimation of Many Quantiles
This work studies the estimation of many statistical quantiles under differential privacy. More precisely, given a distribution and access to i.i.d. samples from it, we study the estimation of the inverse of its cumulati…
Density EstimationDifferentially Private Approximate Quantiles
In this work we study the problem of differentially private (DP) quantiles, in which given dataset $X$ and quantiles $q_1, ..., q_m \in [0,1]$, we want to output $m$ quantile estimations which are as close as possible to…
Unbounded Differentially Private Quantile and Maximum Estimation
In this work we consider the problem of differentially private computation of quantiles for the data, especially the highest quantiles such as maximum, but with an unbounded range for the dataset. We show that this can b…
Differentially Private Quantiles
Quantiles are often used for summarizing and understanding data. If that data is sensitive, it may be necessary to compute quantiles in a way that is differentially private, providing theoretical guarantees that the resu…
Robust method for finding sparse solutions to linear inverse problems using an L2 regularization
We analyzed the performance of a biologically inspired algorithm called the Corrected Projections Algorithm (CPA) when a sparseness constraint is required to unambiguously reconstruct an observed signal using atoms from …
L2 Regularization