Robust and differentially private mean estimation

Authors: Xiyang Liu, Weihao Kong, Sham Kakade, Sewoong Oh

NeurIPS 2021 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details

Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Experimental Numerical experiments support our theoretical claims. The left figure with (α, ε, δ, n) = (0.05, 20, 0.01, 106) is in the large α regime where the DP Mean error is dominates by α d and PRIME error by α p log(1/α). Hence, PRIME error is constant whereas DP Mean error increases with the dimension d.
Researcher Affiliation Academia Xiyang Liu, Weihao Kong, Sham Kakade, Sewoong Oh Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington {xiyangl,whkong,sham,sewoong}@cs.washington.edu
Pseudocode Yes We introduce PRIME (PRIvate and robust Mean Estimation) in 2.3 with details in Algorithm 9 in Appendix E.1, to achieve computational efficiency. We present here the interactive version from the perspective of an analyst accessing the dataset via DP queries (qrange, qsize, qmean, qnorm and q PCA), because this version makes clear the inner operations of each private mechanisms, hence making (i) the sensitivity analysis transparent, (ii) checking the correctness of privacy guarantees easy, and (iii) tracking privacy accountant simple. In practice, one should implement the centralized version (Algorithm 7 in Appendix D), which is significantly more efficient.
Open Source Code No The paper does not contain any explicit statements or links indicating that the source code for the described methodology is publicly available.
Open Datasets No All experiments are performed on synthetic data. We choose µ = 0 and σ = 1. The samples are drawn from N(0, Id) unless otherwise specified. The paper does not provide a link or specific details for accessing this generated data.
Dataset Splits No The paper describes numerical experiments on synthetic data but does not specify training, validation, or test dataset splits.
Hardware Specification No The paper does not provide specific details about the hardware (e.g., GPU/CPU models, memory) used for running its experiments.
Software Dependencies No The paper does not provide specific ancillary software details, such as library names with version numbers, needed to replicate the experiment.
Experiment Setup Yes The left figure with (α, ε, δ, n) = (0.05, 20, 0.01, 106) is in the large α regime... The second figure with (α, ε, δ, n) = (0.001, 20, 0.01, 106) is in the small α regime... The right figure with (α, δ, d, n) = (0.1, 0.01, 10, 106)... Details of the experiments are in Appendix L. All experiments are performed on synthetic data. We choose µ = 0 and σ = 1. The samples are drawn from N(0, Id) unless otherwise specified.