Alexander Knop

Badih Ghazi, Cristóbal Guzmán, Pritish Kamath et al.

We study the problem of generating synthetic data under differential privacy. We establish fixed-parameter tractability (FPT) for this problem where the parameter is the treewidth of the query family's incidence graph. Our algorithms attain optimal error rates across all regimes and are realized by two different approaches: the first is based on linear programming (LP) and the FPT of the separation problem for the LP dual; the second is based on a subsampled private multiplicative weights method, where we obtain FPT for sampling from Gibbs distributions. Both approaches are unified by a dynamic programming framework over a tree decomposition.

Badih Ghazi, Cristóbal Guzmán, Pritish Kamath et al.

We introduce $\mathsf{PREM}$ (Private Relative Error Multiplicative weight update), a new framework for generating synthetic data that achieves a relative error guarantee for statistical queries under $(\varepsilon, δ)$ differential privacy (DP). Namely, for a domain ${\cal X}$, a family ${\cal F}$ of queries $f : {\cal X} \to \{0, 1\}$, and $ζ> 0$, our framework yields a mechanism that on input dataset $D \in {\cal X}^n$ outputs a synthetic dataset $\widehat{D} \in {\cal X}^n$ such that all statistical queries in ${\cal F}$ on $D$, namely $\sum_{x \in D} f(x)$ for $f \in {\cal F}$, are within a $1 \pm ζ$ multiplicative factor of the corresponding value on $\widehat{D}$ up to an additive error that is polynomial in $\log |{\cal F}|$, $\log |{\cal X}|$, $\log n$, $\log(1/δ)$, $1/\varepsilon$, and $1/ζ$. In contrast, any $(\varepsilon, δ)$-DP mechanism is known to require worst-case additive error that is polynomial in at least one of $n, |{\cal F}|$, or $|{\cal X}|$. We complement our algorithm with nearly matching lower bounds.