Uniformity Testing under User-Level Local Privacy

Abstract

We initiate the study of distribution testing under \emph{user-level} local differential privacy, where each of $n$ users contributes $m$ samples from the unknown underlying distribution. This setting, albeit very natural, is significantly more challenging that the usual locally private setting, as for the same parameter $\varepsilon$ the privacy guarantee must now apply to a full batch of $m$ data points. While some recent work consider distribution \emph{learning} in this user-level setting, nothing was known for even the most fundamental testing task, uniformity testing (and its generalization, identity testing). We address this gap, by providing (nearly) sample-optimal user-level LDP algorithms for uniformity and identity testing. Motivated by practical considerations, our main focus is on the private-coin, symmetric setting, which does not require users to share a common random seed nor to have been assigned a globally unique identifier.