A Joint Exponential Mechanism for Differentially Private Top-$k$

Abstract

We present a differentially private algorithm for releasing the sequence of $k$ elements with the highest counts from a data domain of $d$ elements. The algorithm is a "joint" instance of the exponential mechanism, and its output space consists of all $O(d^k)$ length-$k$ sequences. Our main contribution is a method to sample this exponential mechanism in time $O(dk\log(k) + d\log(d))$ and space $O(dk)$. Experiments show that this approach outperforms existing pure differential privacy methods and improves upon even approximate differential privacy methods for moderate $k$.

Cite

Text

Gillenwater et al. "A Joint Exponential Mechanism for Differentially Private Top-$k$." International Conference on Machine Learning, 2022.

Markdown

[Gillenwater et al. "A Joint Exponential Mechanism for Differentially Private Top-$k$." International Conference on Machine Learning, 2022.](https://mlanthology.org/icml/2022/gillenwater2022icml-joint/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{gillenwater2022icml-joint,
  title     = {{A Joint Exponential Mechanism for Differentially Private Top-$k$}},
  author    = {Gillenwater, Jennifer and Joseph, Matthew and Munoz, Andres and Diaz, Monica Ribero},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning},
  year      = {2022},
  pages     = {7570-7582},
  volume    = {162},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/icml/2022/gillenwater2022icml-joint/}
}