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The Correlated Gaussian Sparse Histogram Mechanism

Authors: Christian Janos Lebeda and Lukas Retschmeier

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 329, 6th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2025)


Abstract
We consider the problem of releasing a sparse histogram under (ε, δ)-differential privacy. The stability histogram independently adds noise from a Laplace or Gaussian distribution to the non-zero entries and removes those noisy counts below a threshold. Thereby, the introduction of new non-zero values between neighboring histograms is only revealed with probability at most δ, and typically, the value of the threshold dominates the error of the mechanism. We consider the variant of the stability histogram with Gaussian noise. Recent works ([Joseph and Yu, COLT '24] and [Lebeda, SOSA '25]) reduced the error for private histograms using correlated Gaussian noise. However, these techniques can not be directly applied in the very sparse setting. Instead, we adopt Lebeda’s technique and show that adding correlated noise to the non-zero counts only allows us to reduce the magnitude of noise when we have a sparsity bound. This, in turn, allows us to use a lower threshold by up to a factor of 1/2 compared to the non-correlated noise mechanism. We then extend our mechanism to a setting without a known bound on sparsity. Additionally, we show that correlated noise can give a similar improvement for the more practical discrete Gaussian mechanism.

Cite as

Christian Janos Lebeda and Lukas Retschmeier. The Correlated Gaussian Sparse Histogram Mechanism. In 6th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 329, pp. 23:1-23:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)


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@InProceedings{lebeda_et_al:LIPIcs.FORC.2025.23,
  author =	{Lebeda, Christian Janos and Retschmeier, Lukas},
  title =	{{The Correlated Gaussian Sparse Histogram Mechanism}},
  booktitle =	{6th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2025)},
  pages =	{23:1--23:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-367-6},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{329},
  editor =	{Bun, Mark},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2025.23},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-231503},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2025.23},
  annote =	{Keywords: differential privacy, correlated noise, sparse gaussian histograms}
}
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