Privacy in Statistics and Machine Learning

Adam Smith

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Spring 2023
Privacy in Statistics and Machine Learning

Spring 2023

Lecture videos (from 2021) can be found in this Google Drive folder.

Date Topics Deliverables
Thu 1/19 Lecture 1: Course Overview

Video: Watch these two MinutePhysics videos (1, 2). They introduce some of the course topics in the context of the US Census.
Lecture Slides: pdf
In-class Exercises: pdf (We did not get to these but they are posted for reference.)
=== Unit 1: Reconstruction Attacks ===
Tue 1/24
Lecture 2: Reconstruction Attacks I

Video: part 1, part 2
Lecture Notes: pdf that goes with videos (up through 2.3).
Additional optional reading on reconstruction: Confidence-Ranked Reconstruction of Census Microdata from Published Statistics
In-class Exercises: pdf
Thu 1/26 Lecture 3: Reconstruction Attacks II

Lecture Notes: pdf (2.4 onward)
Video: part 1, part 2
In-class Exercises: pdf
=== Unit 2: Differential Privacy Fundamentals ===
Tue 1/31 Lecture 4: Differential Privacy Fundamentals I

Lecture Notes: pdf
Video: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
In-class Exercises: pdf
Thu 2/2 Lecture 5: Differential Privacy Fundamentals II

Lecture Notes: pdf
Video: part 1, part 2, part 3
In-class Exercises: pdf
Tue 2/7 Lecture 6: Exponential Mechanism and Report Noisy Max

Lecture Notes: (To be posted soon. For now, see last year's notes: pdf)
Video: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4,
In-class Exercises: pdf
Thu 2/9 Lecture 7: Recap and Project Discussion

In-class Exercises: pdf
Project Info: pdf
Homework 1 out (due 2/26): pdf, tex
=== Unit 3: The Algorithmic Toolkit ===
Tue 2/14 Lecture 8: The Binary Tree Mechanism

Lecture Notes: pdf
Video: part 1, part 2
In-class Exercises: pdf
Thu 2/16 Lecture 9: Approximate DP

Lecture Notes: pdf
Lecture Slides: pdf
Video: part 1, part 2
In-class Exercises: None (traditional lecture)
Tue 2/21 No class (Monday schedule)
Thu 2/23 Lecture 10: Advanced Composition

Lecture Notes: pdf
Video: part 1, part 2
In-class Exercises: pdf
Tue 2/28 Lecture 11: Private Empirical Risk Minimization

Lecture Notes: pdf
Video: part 1, part 2
In-class Exercises: N/A (traditional lecture).
Thu 3/2 Lecture 12: Recap

(We discussed exercises from the previous two lectures.)
3/6-3/10 Spring break
Tue 3/14 Lecture 13: Private Gradient Descent

Lecture Notes: pdf
Video: part 1, part 2
In-class Exercises: pdf
Thu 3/16 Lecture 14: DP-FTRL
We discussed how a few different ideas from the class so far come together in he approach of Kairouz, McMahan, Song, Thakkar, Thakurta, Xu (NeurIPS 2021) (We sketched the privacy analysis and proof of Theorem 5.1)
Tue 3/21 Lecture 15: Factorization Mechanisms

Lecture Notes: pdf (up to 2.3)
Video: part 1, part 2
In-class Exercises: pdf
Thu 3/23 Lecture 16: The Projection Mechanism

Lecture Notes: pdf (2.3 onward)
Video: part 1
In-class Exercises: pdf
Tue 3/28 Lecture 17: Online Learning and Multiplicative Weights

Lecture Notes: pdf (Sections 1 to 3.1)
Video: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
In-class Exercises: pdf
Thu 3/30 Lecture 18: Synthetic Data Generation and Online Learning

Lecture Notes (hand-written, from lecture): pdf
Video: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.
In-class Exercises: pdf

Note: For more coverage of this material, see the videos and notes for Lectures 17 and 18 from 2021 (on two-player games and synthetic data generation)
Tue 4/4 Lecture 19: Differential Privacy for Network Data
Guest lecture by Sofya Raskhodnikova
(Based on a paper shared on Piazza with class.)
Thu 4/6 Lecture 20: Lower Bounds from Reconstruction and Membership Inference Attacks

Lecture Notes: pdf
Project progress reports due Friday, 4/7
Tue 4/11 Lecture 21: A Simple Analysis of Robust Membership Inference Attacks

... in which we prove the Fingerprinting Lemma without using calculus. (No lecture notes yet.)
Thu 4/13 Lecture 22: Private Statistical Inference

Lecture slides: pdf
Tue 4/18 Lecture 23: Private PAC Learning
(Guest lecturer: Satchit Sivakumar)

Lecture notes: pdf
Thu 4/20 Lecture 24: OpenDP Tutorial
(Guest lecturer: Michael Shoemate)

Further reading: Documentation, Repository.
Tue 4/25 Lecture 25: Adaptive Data Analysis

Lecture slides: pdf
Thu 4/27 Lecture 26: The Local Model

Lecture slides: pdf
Tue 5/2 Recap Exercises In-class exercises: pdf Draft project report due 5/3
Tue 5/2, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM Project Presentations Revised project report due 5/10