A Primer on Private Statistics

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in differentially private statistical estimation, highlighting the similarities between empirical and population approaches and demonstrating their interchangeable applications.

Contribution

It unifies empirical and population statistical methods under differential privacy, showing their conceptual overlap and providing comprehensive coverage of recent developments.

Findings

Empirical and population privacy methods are more similar than previously thought.

Methods initially designed for empirical data can be adapted for population statistics.

The paper offers a thorough overview of recent differential privacy research.

Abstract

Differentially private statistical estimation has seen a flurry of developments over the last several years. Study has been divided into two schools of thought, focusing on empirical statistics versus population statistics. We suggest that these two lines of work are more similar than different by giving examples of methods that were initially framed for empirical statistics, but can be applied just as well to population statistics. We also provide a thorough coverage of recent work in this area.