Privately Counting Partially Ordered Data

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.