Differentially Private Inference via Noisy Optimization
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SeriesErasmus Econometric Institute Series
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SpeakersMarco Avella Medina (Columbia University, United States)
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FieldEconometrics, Data Science and Econometrics
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LocationErasmus University Rotterdam, E building, room ET-14
Rotterdam -
Date and time
March 21, 2024
12:00 - 13:00
Abstract
We propose a general optimization-based framework for computing differentially private M-estimators and a new method for constructing differentially private confidence regions. First, we show that robust statistics can be used in conjunction with noisy gradient descent or noisy Newton methods in order to obtain optimal private estimators with global linear or quadratic convergence, respectively. We establish local and global convergence guarantees, under both local strong convexity and self-concordance, showing that our private estimators converge with high probability to a small neighborhood of the nonprivate M-estimators. Second, we tackle the problem of parametric inference by constructing differentially private estimators of the
asymptotic variance of our private M-estimators. This naturally leads to approximate pivotal statistics for constructing confidence regions and conducting hypothesis testing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of a bias correction that leads to enhanced small-sample empirical performance in simulations. This is joint work with Casey Bradshaw and Po-Ling Loh