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#1 Improving the Variance of Differentially Private Randomized Experiments through Clustering [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Adel Javanmard, Vahab Mirrokni, Jean Pouget-Abadie

Estimating causal effects from randomized experiments is only possible if participants are willing to disclose their potentially sensitive responses. Differential privacy, a widely used framework for ensuring an algorithm’s privacy guarantees, can encourage participants to share their responses without the risk of de-anonymization. However, many mechanisms achieve differential privacy by adding noise to the original dataset, which reduces the precision of causal effect estimation. This introduces a fundamental trade-off between privacy and variance when performing causal analyses on differentially private data.In this work, we propose a new differentially private mechanism, \textsc{Cluster-DP}, which leverages a given cluster structure in the data to improve the privacy-variance trade-off. While our results apply toany clustering, we demonstrate that selecting higher-quality clusters—according to a quality metric we introduce—can decrease the variance penalty without compromising privacy guarantees. Finally, we evaluate the theoretical and empirical performance of our \textsc{Cluster-DP} algorithm on both real and simulated data, comparing it to common baselines, including two special cases of our algorithm: its unclustered version and a uniform-prior version.

Subject: ICML.2025 - Poster