Formal Privacy Models and Title 13 (Census Cooperative Agreement CB16ADR0160001)

2023
Alabi, Daniel, and Salil Vadhan. “Differentially private hypothesis testing for linear regression.” Journal of Machine Learning Research 24, no. 361 (2023): 1-50. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Version History: Preliminary versions in NeurIPS '22, posted as arXiv:2206.14449 and presented at TPDP ‘21 (poster), IMS ‘22 (oral), and SEA ‘22 (oral). (Previously published as "Hypothesis testing for differentially private linear regression".

 

Abstract:

In this work, we design differentially private hypothesis tests for the following problems in the general linear model: testing a linear relationship and testing for the presence of mixtures. The majority of our hypothesis tests are based on differentially private versions of the $F$-statistic for the general linear model framework, which are uniformly most powerful unbiased in the non-private setting. We also present other tests for these problems, one of which is based on the differentially private nonparametric tests of Couch, Kazan, Shi, Bray, and Groce (CCS 2019), which is especially suited for the small dataset regime. We show that the differentially private $F$-statistic converges to the asymptotic distribution of its non-private counterpart. As a corollary, the statistical power of the differentially private $F$-statistic converges to the statistical power of the non-private $F$-statistic. Through a suite of Monte Carlo based experiments, we show that our tests achieve desired significance levels and have a high power that approaches the power of the non-private tests as we increase sample sizes or the privacy-loss parameter. We also show when our tests outperform existing methods in the literature.

ArXiv 2022.pdf NeurIPS 2022.pdf JMLR 2023.pdf
2018
Karwa, Vishesh, and Salil Vadhan. “Finite sample differentially private confidence intervals.” In Anna R. Karlin, editor, 9th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2018), volume 94 of Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), 44:1-44:9. Dagstuhl, Germany, 2018. Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik. ITCS, 2018. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Version History: Also presented at TPDP 2017. Preliminary version posted as arXiv:1711.03908 [cs.CR].

We study the problem of estimating finite sample confidence intervals of the mean of a normal population under the constraint of differential privacy. We consider both the known and unknown variance cases and construct differentially private algorithms to estimate confidence intervals. Crucially, our algorithms guarantee a finite sample coverage, as opposed to an asymptotic coverage. Unlike most previous differentially private algorithms, we do not require the domain of the samples to be bounded. We also prove lower bounds on the expected size of any differentially private confidence set showing that our the parameters are optimal up to polylogarithmic factors.

ITCS2018.pdf ArXiv2017.pdf