Differentially Private Kernel Density Estimation

We introduce a refined differentially private (DP) data structure for kernel density estimation (KDE), offering not only improved privacy-utility tradeoff but also better efficiency over prior results. Specifically, we study the mathematical problem: given a similarity function $f$ (or DP KDE) and a private dataset $X \subset \mathbb{R}^d$, our goal is to preprocess $X$ so that for any query $y\in\mathbb{R}^d$, we approximate $\sum_{x \in X} f(x, y)$ in a differentially private fashion. The best previous algorithm for $f(x,y) =\| x - y \|_1$ is the node-contaminated balanced binary tree by [Backurs, Lin, Mahabadi, Silwal, and Tarnawski, ICLR 2024]. Their algorithm requires $O(nd)$ space and time for preprocessing with $n=|X|$. For any query point, the query time is $d \log n$, with an error guarantee of $(1+\alpha)$-approximation and $\epsilon^{-1} \alpha^{-0.5} d^{1.5} R \log^{1.5} n$.In this paper, we improve the best previous result [Backurs, Lin, Mahabadi, Silwal, and Tarnawski, ICLR 2024] in three aspects:- We reduce query time by a factor of $\alpha^{-1} \log n$.- We improve the approximation ratio from $\alpha$ to 1.- We reduce the error dependence by a factor of $\alpha^{-0.5}$.From a technical perspective, our method of constructing the search tree differs from previous work [Backurs, Lin, Mahabadi, Silwal, and Tarnawski, ICLR 2024]. In prior work, for each query, the answer is split into $\alpha^{-1} \log n$ numbers, each derived from the summation of $\log n$ values in interval tree countings. In contrast, we construct the tree differently, splitting the answer into $\log n$ numbers, where each is a smart combination of two distance values, two counting values, and $y$ itself. We believe our tree structure may be of independent interest.

@article{liu2025_2409.01688,
  title={ Differentially Private Kernel Density Estimation },
  author={ Erzhi Liu and Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu and Alex Reneau and Zhao Song and Han Liu },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.01688},
  year={ 2025 }
}