16,775 research outputs found
Approximating Hereditary Discrepancy via Small Width Ellipsoids
The Discrepancy of a hypergraph is the minimum attainable value, over
two-colorings of its vertices, of the maximum absolute imbalance of any
hyperedge. The Hereditary Discrepancy of a hypergraph, defined as the maximum
discrepancy of a restriction of the hypergraph to a subset of its vertices, is
a measure of its complexity. Lovasz, Spencer and Vesztergombi (1986) related
the natural extension of this quantity to matrices to rounding algorithms for
linear programs, and gave a determinant based lower bound on the hereditary
discrepancy. Matousek (2011) showed that this bound is tight up to a
polylogarithmic factor, leaving open the question of actually computing this
bound. Recent work by Nikolov, Talwar and Zhang (2013) showed a polynomial time
-approximation to hereditary discrepancy, as a by-product
of their work in differential privacy. In this paper, we give a direct simple
-approximation algorithm for this problem. We show that up to
this approximation factor, the hereditary discrepancy of a matrix is
characterized by the optimal value of simple geometric convex program that
seeks to minimize the largest norm of any point in a ellipsoid
containing the columns of . This characterization promises to be a useful
tool in discrepancy theory
The Geometry of Differential Privacy: the Sparse and Approximate Cases
In this work, we study trade-offs between accuracy and privacy in the context
of linear queries over histograms. This is a rich class of queries that
includes contingency tables and range queries, and has been a focus of a long
line of work. For a set of linear queries over a database , we
seek to find the differentially private mechanism that has the minimum mean
squared error. For pure differential privacy, an approximation to
the optimal mechanism is known. Our first contribution is to give an approximation guarantee for the case of (\eps,\delta)-differential
privacy. Our mechanism is simple, efficient and adds correlated Gaussian noise
to the answers. We prove its approximation guarantee relative to the hereditary
discrepancy lower bound of Muthukrishnan and Nikolov, using tools from convex
geometry.
We next consider this question in the case when the number of queries exceeds
the number of individuals in the database, i.e. when . It is known that better mechanisms exist in this setting. Our second
main contribution is to give an (\eps,\delta)-differentially private
mechanism which is optimal up to a \polylog(d,N) factor for any given query
set and any given upper bound on . This approximation is
achieved by coupling the Gaussian noise addition approach with a linear
regression step. We give an analogous result for the \eps-differential
privacy setting. We also improve on the mean squared error upper bound for
answering counting queries on a database of size by Blum, Ligett, and Roth,
and match the lower bound implied by the work of Dinur and Nissim up to
logarithmic factors.
The connection between hereditary discrepancy and the privacy mechanism
enables us to derive the first polylogarithmic approximation to the hereditary
discrepancy of a matrix
On The Hereditary Discrepancy of Homogeneous Arithmetic Progressions
We show that the hereditary discrepancy of homogeneous arithmetic
progressions is lower bounded by . This bound is tight up
to the constant in the exponent. Our lower bound goes via proving an
exponential lower bound on the discrepancy of set systems of subcubes of the
boolean cube .Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Societ
On largest volume simplices and sub-determinants
We show that the problem of finding the simplex of largest volume in the
convex hull of points in can be approximated with a factor
of in polynomial time. This improves upon the previously best
known approximation guarantee of by Khachiyan. On the other hand,
we show that there exists a constant such that this problem cannot be
approximated with a factor of , unless . % This improves over the
inapproximability that was previously known. Our hardness result holds
even if , in which case there exists a \bar c\,^{d}-approximation
algorithm that relies on recent sampling techniques, where is again a
constant. We show that similar results hold for the problem of finding the
largest absolute value of a subdeterminant of a matrix
Randomized Rounding for the Largest Simplex Problem
The maximum volume -simplex problem asks to compute the -dimensional
simplex of maximum volume inside the convex hull of a given set of points
in . We give a deterministic approximation algorithm for this
problem which achieves an approximation ratio of . The problem
is known to be -hard to approximate within a factor of for
some constant . Our algorithm also gives a factor
approximation for the problem of finding the principal submatrix of
a rank positive semidefinite matrix with the largest determinant. We
achieve our approximation by rounding solutions to a generalization of the
-optimal design problem, or, equivalently, the dual of an appropriate
smallest enclosing ellipsoid problem. Our arguments give a short and simple
proof of a restricted invertibility principle for determinants
Towards a Constructive Version of Banaszczyk's Vector Balancing Theorem
An important theorem of Banaszczyk (Random Structures & Algorithms `98)
states that for any sequence of vectors of norm at most and any
convex body of Gaussian measure in , there exists a
signed combination of these vectors which lands inside . A major open
problem is to devise a constructive version of Banaszczyk's vector balancing
theorem, i.e. to find an efficient algorithm which constructs the signed
combination.
We make progress towards this goal along several fronts. As our first
contribution, we show an equivalence between Banaszczyk's theorem and the
existence of -subgaussian distributions over signed combinations. For the
case of symmetric convex bodies, our equivalence implies the existence of a
universal signing algorithm (i.e. independent of the body), which simply
samples from the subgaussian sign distribution and checks to see if the
associated combination lands inside the body. For asymmetric convex bodies, we
provide a novel recentering procedure, which allows us to reduce to the case
where the body is symmetric.
As our second main contribution, we show that the above framework can be
efficiently implemented when the vectors have length ,
recovering Banaszczyk's results under this stronger assumption. More precisely,
we use random walk techniques to produce the required -subgaussian
signing distributions when the vectors have length , and
use a stochastic gradient ascent method to implement the recentering procedure
for asymmetric bodies
Nearly Optimal Private Convolution
We study computing the convolution of a private input with a public input
, while satisfying the guarantees of -differential
privacy. Convolution is a fundamental operation, intimately related to Fourier
Transforms. In our setting, the private input may represent a time series of
sensitive events or a histogram of a database of confidential personal
information. Convolution then captures important primitives including linear
filtering, which is an essential tool in time series analysis, and aggregation
queries on projections of the data.
We give a nearly optimal algorithm for computing convolutions while
satisfying -differential privacy. Surprisingly, we follow
the simple strategy of adding independent Laplacian noise to each Fourier
coefficient and bounding the privacy loss using the composition theorem of
Dwork, Rothblum, and Vadhan. We derive a closed form expression for the optimal
noise to add to each Fourier coefficient using convex programming duality. Our
algorithm is very efficient -- it is essentially no more computationally
expensive than a Fast Fourier Transform.
To prove near optimality, we use the recent discrepancy lowerbounds of
Muthukrishnan and Nikolov and derive a spectral lower bound using a
characterization of discrepancy in terms of determinants
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