Differentially Private Weighted Sampling
This addresses privacy concerns in data analytics for applications like transactions and products, offering a practical and efficient solution that integrates with existing non-private schemes.
The paper tackles the problem of performing analytics on aggregated key-frequency data while ensuring element-level differential privacy, proposing Private Weighted Sampling (PWS) that improves key reporting by 20%-300% and estimation accuracy by factors of 2-8 compared to prior methods.
Common datasets have the form of elements with keys (e.g., transactions and products) and the goal is to perform analytics on the aggregated form of key and frequency pairs. A weighted sample of keys by (a function of) frequency is a highly versatile summary that provides a sparse set of representative keys and supports approximate evaluations of query statistics. We propose private weighted sampling (PWS): A method that ensures element-level differential privacy while retaining, to the extent possible, the utility of a respective non-private weighted sample. PWS maximizes the reporting probabilities of keys and estimation quality of a broad family of statistics. PWS improves over the state of the art also for the well-studied special case of private histograms, when no sampling is performed. We empirically demonstrate significant performance gains compared with prior baselines: 20%-300% increase in key reporting for common Zipfian frequency distributions and accuracy for $\times 2$-$ 8$ lower frequencies in estimation tasks. Moreover, PWS is applied as a simple post-processing of a non-private sample, without requiring the original data. This allows for seamless integration with existing implementations of non-private schemes and retaining the efficiency of schemes designed for resource-constrained settings such as massive distributed or streamed data. We believe that due to practicality and performance, PWS may become a method of choice in applications where privacy is desired.