On Computing Pairwise Statistics with Local Differential Privacy

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Main Conference Track

Bibtex Paper

Authors

Badih Ghazi, Pritish Kamath, Ravi Kumar, Pasin Manurangsi, Adam Sealfon

Abstract

We study the problem of computing pairwise statistics, i.e., ones of the form $\binom{n}{2}^{-1} \sum_{i \ne j} f(x_i, x_j)$, where $x_i$ denotes the input to the $i$th user, with differential privacy (DP) in the local model. This formulation captures important metrics such as Kendall's $\tau$ coefficient, Area Under Curve, Gini's mean difference, Gini's entropy, etc. We give several novel and generic algorithms for the problem, leveraging techniques from DP algorithms for linear queries.