Paper 2024/1464 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2024/1464 ↗

SoK: Descriptive Statistics Under Local Differential Privacy

René Raab
Pascal Berrang
Paul Gerhart
Dominique Schröder
Abstract

Local Differential Privacy (LDP) provides a formal guarantee of privacy that enables the collection and analysis of sensitive data without revealing any individual's data. While LDP methods have been extensively studied, there is a lack of a systematic and empirical comparison of LDP methods for descriptive statistics. In this paper, we first provide a systematization of LDP methods for descriptive statistics, comparing their properties and requirements. We demonstrate that several mean estimation methods based on sampling from a Bernoulli distribution are equivalent in the one-dimensional case and introduce methods for variance estimation. We then empirically compare methods for mean, variance, and frequency estimation. Finally, we provide recommendations for the use of LDP methods for descriptive statistics and discuss their limitations and open questions.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Preprint.
History
2024-10-21: last updated
2024-09-19: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2024/1464
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2024/1464,
      author = {René Raab and Pascal Berrang and Paul Gerhart and Dominique Schröder},
      title = {SoK: Descriptive Statistics Under Local Differential Privacy},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2024/1464},
      year = {2024},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1464}
}
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