On the Complexity of Differentially Private Best-Arm Identification with Fixed Confidence - Université de Lyon
Conference Papers Year : 2023

On the Complexity of Differentially Private Best-Arm Identification with Fixed Confidence

Abstract

Best Arm Identification (BAI) problems are progressively used for data-sensitive applications, such as designing adaptive clinical trials, tuning hyper-parameters, and conducting user studies to name a few. Motivated by the data privacy concerns invoked by these applications, we study the problem of BAI with fixed confidence under $\epsilon$-global Differential Privacy (DP). First, to quantify the cost of privacy, we derive a lower bound on the sample complexity of any $\delta$-correct BAI algorithm satisfying $\epsilon$-global DP. Our lower bound suggests the existence of two privacy regimes depending on the privacy budget $\epsilon$. In the high-privacy regime (small $\epsilon$), the hardness depends on a coupled effect of privacy and a novel information-theoretic quantity, called the Total Variation Characteristic Time. In the low-privacy regime (large $\epsilon$), the sample complexity lower bound reduces to the classical non-private lower bound. Second, we propose AdaP-TT, an $\epsilon$-global DP variant of the Top Two algorithm. AdaP-TT runs in arm-dependent adaptive episodes and adds Laplace noise to ensure a good privacy-utility trade-off. We derive an asymptotic upper bound on the sample complexity of AdaP-TT that matches with the lower bound up to multiplicative constants in the high-privacy regime. Finally, we provide an experimental analysis of AdaP-TT that validates our theoretical results.

Dates and versions

hal-04215474 , version 1 (22-09-2023)

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Achraf Azize, Marc Jourdan, Aymen Al Marjani, Debabrota Basu. On the Complexity of Differentially Private Best-Arm Identification with Fixed Confidence. NeurIPS 2023 – Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Dec 2023, New Orleans (US), United States. pp.71150--71194. ⟨hal-04215474⟩
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