On the Meaning and Limits of Empirical Differential Privacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Empirical differential privacy (EDP) has been proposed as an alternative to differential privacy (DP), with the important advantages that the procedure can be applied to any bayesian model and requires less technical work from the part of the user. While EDP has been shown to be easy to implement, little is known of its theoretical underpinnings. This paper proposes a careful investigation of the meaning and limits of EDP as a measure of privacy. We show that EDP can not simply be considered an empirical version of DP, and that it could instead be thought of as a sensitivity measure on posterior distributions. We also show that EDP is not well-defined, in that its value depends crucially on the choice of discretization used in the procedure, and that it can be very computationnaly intensive to apply in practice. We illustrate these limitations with two simple conjugate bayesian model: the beta-binomial model and the normal-normal model.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.039 | 0.149 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".