Incompatibilities Between Current Practices in Statistical Data Analysis and Differential Privacy

TL;DR

This paper examines the fundamental incompatibilities between traditional statistical data analysis practices and differential privacy, highlighting challenges and proposing the need for methodological changes.

Contribution

It identifies key incompatibilities and discusses the necessity of adapting either statistical analysis methods or differential privacy approaches to resolve them.

Findings

Current practices often conflict with differential privacy requirements

Overcoming incompatibilities requires methodological compromises

Addressing these issues is crucial for effective privacy-preserving data analysis

Abstract

The authors discuss their experience applying differential privacy with a complex data set with the goal of enabling standard approaches to statistical data analysis. They highlight lessons learned and roadblocks encountered, distilling them into incompatibilities between current practices in statistical data analysis and differential privacy that go beyond issues which can be solved with a noisy measurements file. The authors discuss how overcoming these incompatibilities require compromise and a change in either our approach to statistical data analysis or differential privacy that should be addressed head-on.