Boosting the accuracy of differentially private histograms through consistency

  • Authors:
  • Michael Hay;Vibhor Rastogi;Gerome Miklau;Dan Suciu

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst;University of Washington;University of Massachusetts Amherst;University of Washington

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We show that it is possible to significantly improve the accuracy of a general class of histogram queries while satisfying differential privacy. Our approach carefully chooses a set of queries to evaluate, and then exploits consistency constraints that should hold over the noisy output. In a post-processing phase, we compute the consistent input most likely to have produced the noisy output. The final output is differentially-private and consistent, but in addition, it is often much more accurate. We show, both theoretically and experimentally, that these techniques can be used for estimating the degree sequence of a graph very precisely, and for computing a histogram that can support arbitrary range queries accurately.