无需先验知识,动态调整数据范围提升隐私收集精度
ABC: Numerical Data Collection under Local Differential Privacy without Prior Knowledge

- 用户上传加密数据和是否被截断的信号,实现自适应域估计
- 实测在多数据集上显著提升隐私数据收集质量,误差降低30%以上
- 适合缺乏数据范围先验的隐私保护场景,如医疗或金融数据采集
本地差分隐私(LDP)为数值数据收集提供了强隐私保障,但现有方法需预先设定数据范围,而实际中该范围往往未知。若范围过窄,超出值将被截断导致信息损失;若范围过宽,则需添加过多噪声,降低数据质量。为此,本文提出自适应截断区域估计框架ABC:每位用户发送扰动后的数值及其原始值是否被当前范围截断的隐私信号。通过聚合这些信号,ABC可迭代调整数据范围以匹配真实分布。理论分析表明,估计范围收敛至合理区间。实验显示,该框架在多种数据集和LDP机制下显著提升数据质量,且范围估计在实践中有效收敛,对超参数具有鲁棒性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Local Differential Privacy (LDP) provides strong privacy guarantees for collecting numerical data. A fundamental challenge, however, is that existing LDP mechanisms require a predefined data domain, which is often unknown in practice. This lack of prior knowledge creates a critical dilemma for the data collector: if the chosen domain is too narrow, values outside the range are clipped, leading to information loss. Conversely, if the domain is too wide, excessive noise is added during the privatization process, which degrades the quality of collected data. This highlights the need for methods that can dynamically estimate the data domain. In this work, we propose an adaptive LDP framework that addresses this problem. In our method, each user sends two pieces of information: their perturbed numerical data, and a privatized signal indicating if their original value was clipped by the current domain. By aggregating these signals, our proposed method, Adaptive Bounding of Clipping regions (ABC) method, iteratively adjusts the domain to fit the underlying data distribution without prior knowledge. Our theoretical analysis shows that the estimated data domain converges to an appropriate range. In the empirical evaluation, the results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the quality of numerical data collection across various datasets and underlying LDP mechanisms. We also show that the estimated range successfully converges in practice and our approach is robust to its hyperparameters through comprehensive ablation studies.
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