text: We investigate the direct-sum problem in the context of differentially private PAC learning: What is the sample complexity of solving k learning tasks simultaneously under differential privacy, and how does this cost compare to that of solving k learning tasks without privacy? In our setting, an individual example consists of a domain element x labeled by k unknown concepts (c1,...,ck). The goal of a multi-learner is to output k hypotheses (h1,...,hk) that generalize the input examples. Without concern for privacy, the sample complexity needed to simultaneously learn @math concepts is essentially the same as needed for learning a single concept. Under differential privacy, the basic strategy of learning each hypothesis independently yields sample complexity that grows polynomially with k. For some concept classes, we give multi-learners that require fewer samples than the basic strategy. Unfortunately, however, we also give lower bounds showing that even for very simple concept classes, the sample cost of private multi-learning must grow polynomially in k.
  @cite_38: We consider a statistical database in which a trusted administrator introduces noise to the query responses with the goal of maintaining privacy of individual database entries. In such a database, a query consists of a pair (S, f) where S is a set of rows in the database and f is a function mapping database rows to 0, 1 . The true answer is Σ ieS f(d i ), and a noisy version is released as the response to the query. Results of Dinur, Dwork, and Nissim show that a strong form of privacy can be maintained using a surprisingly small amount of noise -- much less than the sampling error -- provided the total number of queries is sublinear in the number of database rows. We call this query and (slightly) noisy reply the SuLQ (Sub-Linear Queries) primitive. The assumption of sublinearity becomes reasonable as databases grow increasingly large.We extend this work in two ways. First, we modify the privacy analysis to real-valued functions f and arbitrary row types, as a consequence greatly improving the bounds on noise required for privacy. Second, we examine the computational power of the SuLQ primitive. We show that it is very powerful indeed, in that slightly noisy versions of the following computations can be carried out with very few invocations of the primitive: principal component analysis, k means clustering, the Perceptron Algorithm, the ID3 algorithm, and (apparently!) all algorithms that operate in the in the statistical query learning model [11].
  @cite_18: In this work we provide efficient distributed protocols for generating shares of random noise, secure against malicious participants. The purpose of the noise generation is to create a distributed implementation of the privacy-preserving statistical databases described in recent papers [14,4,13]. In these databases, privacy is obtained by perturbing the true answer to a database query by the addition of a small amount of Gaussian or exponentially distributed random noise. The computational power of even a simple form of these databases, when the query is just of the form Σ i f(d i ), that is, the sum over all rows i in the database of a function f applied to the data in row i, has been demonstrated in [4]. A distributed implementation eliminates the need for a trusted database administrator. The results for noise generation are of independent interest. The generation of Gaussian noise introduces a technique for distributing shares of many unbiased coins with fewer executions of verifiable secret sharing than would be needed using previous approaches (reduced by a factor of n). The generation of exponentially distributed noise uses two shallow circuits: one for generating many arbitrarily but identically biased coins at an amortized cost of two unbiased random bits apiece, independent of the bias, and the other to combine bits of appropriate biases to obtain an exponential distribution.
  @cite_26: In 2008, Kasiviswanathan el al. defined private learning as a combination of PAC learning and differential privacy [16]. Informally, a private learner is applied to a collection of labeled individual information and outputs a hypothesis while preserving the privacy of each individual. gave a generic construction of private learners for (finite) concept classes, with sample complexity logarithmic in the size of the concept class. This sample complexity is higher than what is needed for non-private learners, hence leaving open the possibility that the sample complexity of private learning may be sometimes significantly higher than that of non-private learning. We give a combinatorial characterization of the sample size sufficient and necessary to privately learn a class of concepts. This characterization is analogous to the well known characterization of the sample complexity of non-private learning in terms of the VC dimension of the concept class. We introduce the notion of probabilistic representation of a concept class, and our new complexity measure RepDim corresponds to the size of the smallest probabilistic representation of the concept class. We show that any private learning algorithm for a concept class C with sample complexity m implies RepDim(C) = O(m), and that there exists a private learning algorithm with sample complexity m = O(RepDim(C)). We further demonstrate that a similar characterization holds for the database size needed for privately computing a large class of optimization problems and also for the well studied problem of private data release.
  @cite_4: 
  @cite_8: In this work we analyze the sample complexity of classification by differentially private algorithms. Differential privacy is a strong and well-studied notion of privacy introduced by (2006) that ensures that the output of an algorithm leaks little information about the data point provided by any of the participating individuals. Sample complexity of private PAC and agnostic learning was studied in a number of prior works starting with (, 2008) but a number of basic questions still remain open, most notably whether learning with privacy requires more samples than learning without privacy. We show that the sample complexity of learning with (pure) differential privacy can be arbitrarily higher than the sample complexity of learning without the privacy constraint or the sample complexity of learning with approximate differential privacy. Our second contribution and the main tool is an equivalence between the sample complexity of (pure) differentially private learning of a concept class @math (or @math ) and the randomized one-way communication complexity of the evaluation problem for concepts from @math . Using this equivalence we prove the following bounds: 1. @math , where @math is the Littlestone's (1987) dimension characterizing the number of mistakes in the online-mistake-bound learning model. Known bounds on @math then imply that @math can be much higher than the VC-dimension of @math . 2. For any @math , there exists a class @math such that @math but @math . 3. For any @math , there exists a class @math such that the sample complexity of (pure) @math -differentially private PAC learning is @math but the sample complexity of the relaxed @math -differentially private PAC learning is @math . This resolves an open problem of (2013b).
  @cite_42: This work studies the problem of privacy-preserving classication namely, learning a classier from sensitive data while preserving the privacy of individuals in the training set.
  @cite_1: We continue a line of research initiated in [10,11]on privacy-preserving statistical databases. Consider a trusted server that holds a database of sensitive information. Given a query function f mapping databases to reals, the so-called true answer is the result of applying f to the database. To protect privacy, the true answer is perturbed by the addition of random noise generated according to a carefully chosen distribution, and this response, the true answer plus noise, is returned to the user. Previous work focused on the case of noisy sums, in which f = ∑ig(xi), where xi denotes the ith row of the database and g maps database rows to [0,1]. We extend the study to general functions f, proving that privacy can be preserved by calibrating the standard deviation of the noise according to the sensitivity of the function f. Roughly speaking, this is the amount that any single argument to f can change its output. The new analysis shows that for several particular applications substantially less noise is needed than was previously understood to be the case. The first step is a very clean characterization of privacy in terms of indistinguishability of transcripts. Additionally, we obtain separation results showing the increased value of interactive sanitization mechanisms over non-interactive.
  @cite_32: In this article, we demonstrate that, ignoring computational constraints, it is possible to release synthetic databases that are useful for accurately answering large classes of queries while preserving differential privacy. Specifically, we give a mechanism that privately releases synthetic data useful for answering a class of queries over a discrete domain with error that grows as a function of the size of the smallest net approximately representing the answers to that class of queries. We show that this in particular implies a mechanism for counting queries that gives error guarantees that grow only with the VC-dimension of the class of queries, which itself grows at most logarithmically with the size of the query class. We also show that it is not possible to release even simple classes of queries (such as intervals and their generalizations) over continuous domains with worst-case utility guarantees while preserving differential privacy. In response to this, we consider a relaxation of the utility guarantee and give a privacy preserving polynomial time algorithm that for any halfspace query will provide an answer that is accurate for some small perturbation of the query. This algorithm does not release synthetic data, but instead another data structure capable of representing an answer for each query. We also give an efficient algorithm for releasing synthetic data for the class of interval queries and axis-aligned rectangles of constant dimension over discrete domains.
  @cite_3: Learning problems form an important category of computational tasks that generalizes many of the computations researchers apply to large real-life data sets. We ask, What concept classes can be learned privately, namely, by an algorithm whose output does not depend too heavily on any one input or specific training example? More precisely, we investigate learning algorithms that satisfy differential privacy, a notion that provides strong confidentiality guarantees in contexts where aggregate information is released about a database containing sensitive information about individuals. Our goal is a broad understanding of the resources required for private learning in terms of samples, computation time, and interaction. We demonstrate that, ignoring computational constraints, it is possible to privately agnostically learn any concept class using a sample size approximately logarithmic in the cardinality of the concept class. Therefore, almost anything learnable is learnable privately: specifically, if a concept class is learnable by a (nonprivate) algorithm with polynomial sample complexity and output size, then it can be learned privately using a polynomial number of samples. We also present a computationally efficient private probabilistically approximately correct learner for the class of parity functions. This result dispels the similarity between learning with noise and private learning (both must be robust to small changes in inputs), since parity is thought to be very hard to learn given random classification noise. Local (or randomized response) algorithms are a practical class of private algorithms that have received extensive investigation. We provide a precise characterization of local private learning algorithms. We show that a concept class is learnable by a local algorithm if and only if it is learnable in the statistical query (SQ) model. Therefore, for local private learning algorithms, the similarity to learning with noise is stronger: local learning is equivalent to SQ learning, and SQ algorithms include most known noise-tolerant learning algorithms. Finally, we present a separation between the power of interactive and noninteractive local learning algorithms. Because of the equivalence to SQ learning, this result also separates adaptive and nonadaptive SQ learning.
  @cite_39: We prove new upper and lower bounds on the sample complexity of (a#x03B5;, a#x03B4;) differentially private algorithms for releasing approximate answers to threshold functions. A threshold function cx over a totally ordered domain X evaluates to cx(y) = 1 if y a#x2264; x, and evaluates to 0 otherwise. We give the first nontrivial lower bound for releasing thresholds with (a#x03B5;, a#x03B4;) differential privacy, showing that the task is impossible over an infinite domain X, and moreover requires sample complexity n a#x2265; (log* |X|), which grows with the size of the domain. Inspired by the techniques used to prove this lower bound, we give an algorithm for releasing thresholds with n a#x2264; 2(1+o(1)) log* |X| samples. This improves the previous best upper bound of 8(1+o(1)) log* |X| (, RANDOM'13). Our sample complexity upper and lower bounds also apply to the tasks of learning distributions with respect to Kolmogorov distance and of properly PAC learning thresholds with differential privacy. The lower bound gives the first separation between the sample complexity of properly learning a concept class with (a#x03B5;, a#x03B4;) differential privacy and learning without privacy. For properly learning thresholds in 'dimensions, this lower bound extends to n a#x2265; (l a#x2219; log* |X|). To obtain our results, we give reductions in both directions from releasing and properly learning thresholds and the simpler interior point problem. Given a database D of elements from X, the interior point problem asks for an element between the smallest and largest elements in D. We introduce new recursive constructions for bounding the sample complexity of the interior point problem, as well as further reductions and techniques for proving impossibility results for other basic problems in differential privacy.
  @cite_0: Boosting is a general method for improving the accuracy of learning algorithms. We use boosting to construct improved privacy-preserving synopses of an input database. These are data structures that yield, for a given set @math of queries over an input database, reasonably accurate estimates of the responses to every query in @math , even when the number of queries is much larger than the number of rows in the database. Given a base synopsis generator that takes a distribution on @math and produces a weak'' synopsis that yields good'' answers for a majority of the weight in @math , our Boosting for Queries algorithm obtains a synopsis that is good for all of @math . We ensure privacy for the rows of the database, but the boosting is performed on the queries . We also provide the first synopsis generators for arbitrary sets of arbitrary low-sensitivity queries, i.e. , queries whose answers do not vary much under the addition or deletion of a single row. In the execution of our algorithm certain tasks, each incurring some privacy loss, are performed many times. To analyze the cumulative privacy loss, we obtain an @math bound on the expected privacy loss from a single @math - mechanism. Combining this with evolution of confidence arguments from the literature, we get stronger bounds on the expected cumulative privacy loss due to multiple mechanisms, each of which provides @math -differential privacy or one of its relaxations, and each of which operates on (potentially) different, adaptively chosen, databases.
  @cite_24: We compare the sample complexity of private learning [ 2008] and sanitization [ 2008] under pure @math -differential privacy [ TCC 2006] and approximate @math -differential privacy [ Eurocrypt 2006]. We show that the sample complexity of these tasks under approximate differential privacy can be significantly lower than that under pure differential privacy. We define a family of optimization problems, which we call Quasi-Concave Promise Problems, that generalizes some of our considered tasks. We observe that a quasi-concave promise problem can be privately approximated using a solution to a smaller instance of a quasi-concave promise problem. This allows us to construct an efficient recursive algorithm solving such problems privately. Specifically, we construct private learners for point functions, threshold functions, and axis-aligned rectangles in high dimension. Similarly, we construct sanitizers for point functions and threshold functions. We also examine the sample complexity of label-private learners, a relaxation of private learning where the learner is required to only protect the privacy of the labels in the sample. We show that the VC dimension completely characterizes the sample complexity of such learners, that is, the sample complexity of learning with label privacy is equal (up to constants) to learning without privacy.
  @cite_17: A private learner is an algorithm that given a sample of labeled individual examples outputs a generalizing hypothesis while preserving the privacy of each individual. In 2008, (FOCS 2008) gave a generic construction of private learners, in which the sample complexity is (generally) higher than what is needed for non-private learners. This gap in the sample complexity was then further studied in several followup papers, showing that (at least in some cases) this gap is unavoidable. Moreover, those papers considered ways to overcome the gap, by relaxing either the privacy or the learning guarantees of the learner. We suggest an alternative approach, inspired by the (non-private) models of semi-supervised learning and active-learning, where the focus is on the sample complexity of labeled examples whereas unlabeled examples are of a significantly lower cost. We consider private semi-supervised learners that operate on a random sample, where only a (hopefully small) portion of this sample is labeled. The learners have no control over which of the sample elements are labeled. Our main result is that the labeled sample complexity of private learners is characterized by the VC dimension. We present two generic constructions of private semi-supervised learners. The first construction is of learners where the labeled sample complexity is proportional to the VC dimension of the concept class, however, the unlabeled sample complexity of the algorithm is as big as the representation length of domain elements. Our second construction presents a new technique for decreasing the labeled sample complexity of a given private learner, while roughly maintaining its unlabeled sample complexity. In addition, we show that in some settings the labeled sample complexity does not depend on the privacy parameters of the learner.
summary: Differential privacy was defined in @cite_1 and the relaxation to approximate differential privacy is from @cite_18 . Most related to our work is the work on private learning and its sample complexity @cite_38 @cite_3 @cite_4 @cite_0 @cite_42 @cite_26 @cite_24 @cite_8 @cite_17 @cite_39 and the early work on sanitization @cite_32 . That many natural'' learning tasks can be performed privately was shown in the early work of @cite_38 and @cite_3 . A characterization for the sample complexity of pure-private learners was given in @cite_26 , in terms of a new combinatorial measure -- the Representation Dimension , that is, given a class @math , the number of samples needed and sufficient for privately learning @math is @math . Building on @cite_26 , Feldman and Xiao @cite_8 showed an equivalence between the representation dimension of a concept @math and the randomized one-way communication complexity of the evaluation problem for concepts from @math . Using this equivalence they separated the sample complexity of pure-private learners from that of non-private ones.