Privately Counting Partially Ordered Data

Part of International Conference on Representation Learning 2025 (ICLR 2025) Conference

Bibtex Paper

Authors

Matthew Joseph, Mónica Ribero, Alexander Yu

Abstract

We consider differentially private counting when each data point consists of $d$ bits satisfying a partial order. Our main technical contribution is a problem-specific $K$-norm mechanism that runs in time $O(d^2)$. Experiments show that, depending on the partial order in question, our solution dominates existing pure differentially private mechanisms and can reduce their error by an order of magnitude or more.