Differentially Private Histograms under Continual Observation: Streaming Selection into the Unknown
Adrian Rivera Cardoso, Ryan Rogers
Abstract
We generalize the continuous observation privacy setting from Dwork et al. and Chan et al. by allowing each event in a stream to be a subset of some (possibly unknown) universe of items. We design differentially private (DP) algorithms for histograms in several settings, including top-k selection, with privacy loss that scales with polylog(T), where T is the maximum length of the input stream. We present a meta-algorithm that can use existing one-shot top-k private algorithms as a subroutine to continuously release DP histograms from a stream. Further, we present more practical DP algorithms for two settings: 1) continuously releasing the top-k counts from a histogram over a known domain when an event can consist of an arbitrary number of items, and 2) continuously releasing histograms over an unknown domain when an event has a limited number of items.
BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v151-rivera-cardoso22a,
title = { Differentially Private Histograms under Continual Observation: Streaming Selection into the Unknown },
author = {Rivera Cardoso, Adrian and Rogers, Ryan},
booktitle = {Proceedings of The 25th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
pages = {2397--2419},
year = {2022},
editor = {Camps-Valls, Gustau and Ruiz, Francisco J. R. and Valera, Isabel},
volume = {151},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month = {28--30 Mar},
publisher = {PMLR},
pdf = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v151/rivera-cardoso22a/rivera-cardoso22a.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v151/rivera-cardoso22a.html},
abstract = { We generalize the continuous observation privacy setting from Dwork et al. and Chan et al. by allowing each event in a stream to be a subset of some (possibly unknown) universe of items. We design differentially private (DP) algorithms for histograms in several settings, including top-k selection, with privacy loss that scales with polylog(T), where T is the maximum length of the input stream. We present a meta-algorithm that can use existing one-shot top-k private algorithms as a subroutine to continuously release DP histograms from a stream. Further, we present more practical DP algorithms for two settings: 1) continuously releasing the top-k counts from a histogram over a known domain when an event can consist of an arbitrary number of items, and 2) continuously releasing histograms over an unknown domain when an event has a limited number of items. }
}