Incorporating Item Frequency for Differentially Private Set Union
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study the problem of releasing the set union of users' items subject to differential privacy. Previous approaches consider only the set of items for each user as the input. We propose incorporating the item frequency, which is typically available in set union problems, to boost the utility of private mechanisms. However, using the global item frequency over all users would largely increase privacy loss. We propose to use the local item frequency of each user to approximate the global item frequency without incurring additional privacy loss. Local item frequency allows us to design greedy set union mechanisms that are differentially private, which is impossible for previous greedy proposals. Moreover, while all previous works have to use uniform sampling to limit the number of items each user would contribute to, our construction eliminates the sampling step completely and allows our mechanisms to consider all of the users' items. Finally, we propose to transfer the knowledge of the global item frequency from a public dataset into our mechanism, which further boosts utility even when the public and private datasets are from different domains. We evaluate the proposed methods on multiple real-life datasets.
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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 | 0.023 | 0.059 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".