Differential privacy is a framework to quantify to what extent individual privacy in a statistical database is preserved while releasing useful aggregate information about the database. In this work we study the fundamental tradeoff between privacy and utility in differential privacy. We derive the optimal -differentially private mechanism for single realvalued query function under a very general utility-maximization (or cost-minimization) framework. The class of noise probability distributions in the optimal mechanism has staircase-shaped probability density functions, which can be viewed as a geometric mixture of uniform probability distributions. In the context of 1 and 2 utility functions, we show that the standard Laplacian mechanism, which has been widely used in the literature, is asymptotically optimal in the high privacy regime, while in the low privacy regime, the staircase mechanism performs exponentially better than the Laplacian mechanism. We conclude that the gains of the staircase mechanism are more pronounced in the moderate-low privacy regime.
Under some assumptions about the utility metric, REF shows that the optimal perturbation probability distribution has a symmetric staircase-shaped probability density function.
The optimal mechanism in differential privacy
2014 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory
2014 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory
Computer Science Mathematics