Papers › Differentially Private Covariance Revisited

Differentially Private Covariance Revisited

28 May 2022arXiv:2205.14324archive 2025-07-28

Wei Dong, Yuting Liang, Ke Yi

In this paper, we present two new algorithms for covariance estimation under concentrated differential privacy (zCDP). The first algorithm achieves a Frobenius error of Õ(d^(1/4)√(tr)/√(n) + √(d)/n), where tr is the trace of the covariance matrix. By taking tr=1, this also implies a worst-case error bound of Õ(d^(1/4)/√(n)), which improves the standard Gaussian mechanism's Õ(d/n) for the regime d>Ω(n^(2/3)). Our second algorithm offers a tail-sensitive bound that could be much better on skewed data. The corresponding algorithms are also simple and efficient. Experimental results show that they offer significant improvements over prior work.

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hkustdb/privatecovariance officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
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