Differentially Private Significance Tests for Regression Coefficients

ABSTRACT

Many data producers seek to provide users access to confidential data without unduly compromising data subjects’ privacy and confidentiality. One general strategy is to require users to do analyses without seeing the confidential data; for example, analysts only get access to synthetic data or query systems that provide disclosure-protected outputs of statistical models. With synthetic data or redacted outputs, the analyst never really knows how much to trust the resulting findings. In particular, if the user did the same analysis on the confidential data, would regression coefficients of interest be statistically significant or not? We present algorithms for assessing this question that satisfy differential privacy. We describe conditions under which the algorithms should give accurate answers about statistical significance. We illustrate the properties of the proposed methods using artificial and genuine data. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

KEYWORDS:

• Confidentiality
• Disclosure
• Laplace
• Query
• Synthetic
• Verification

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (ACI 1443014 and SES 1131897) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (G-2-15-20166003).