Estimating Numerical Distributions under Local Differential Privacy

Summary: Numerical-domain local differential privacy for distribution estimation using a square wave (SW) reporting mechanism that exploits domain structure to improve privacy-utility over discretization. An EMS (Expectation Maximization with Smoothing) algorithm on SW histograms recovers the original distribution, with experiments showing SW+EMS consistently outperforms baselines on utility metrics. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h793353129a65bead
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2020
Pagerank: 7.9855215e-05
Overall Rank: 2,803 | 81.16%
DOI: 10.1145/3318464.3389700

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Zitao Li (Purdue University)
2. Tianhao Wang (Purdue University)
3. Milan Lopuhaä-Zwakenberg (Eindhoven University of Technology)
4. Ninghui Li (Purdue University)
5. Boris Škorić (Eindhoven University of Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{li_sigmod20,
        title = {{Estimating Numerical Distributions under Local Differential Privacy}},
        author = {Li, Zitao and Wang, Tianhao and Lopuhaä-Zwakenberg, Milan and Li, Ninghui and Škorić, Boris},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '20},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3318464.3389700},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3318464.3389700},
        year = {2020}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,214	Answering Multi-Dimensional Range Queries under Local Differential Privacy	2021	VLDB	6.7295366e-05
5,883	LDPTrace: Locally Differentially Private Trajectory Synthesis	2023	VLDB	5.9587932e-05
9,473	PriPL-Tree: Accurate Range Query for Arbitrary Distribution under Local Differential Privacy	2024	VLDB	5.1708619e-05
9,726	PrivRM: A Framework for Range Mean Estimation under Local Differential Privacy	2025	SIGMOD	5.1349531e-05
10,631	Defense against Poisoning Attacks under Shuffle-DP	2026	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
10,639	Enhancing Local Differential Privacy Accuracy by Exploiting Inherent Uncertainty	2026	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,244	Privacy for Free: Leveraging Local Differential Privacy Perturbed Data from Multiple Services	2025	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,356	Continuous Publication of Weighted Graphs with Local Differential Privacy	2025	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,566	AAA: an Adaptive Mechanism for Locally Differentially Private Mean Estimation	2024	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,756	Trajectory Data Collection with Local Differential Privacy	2023	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
121	Boosting the Accuracy of Differentially Private Histograms Through Consistency	2010	VLDB	0.00031089378
558	Understanding Hierarchical Methods for Differentially Private Histograms	2013	VLDB	0.00016470707
2,336	Answering Multi-Dimensional Analytical Queries under Local Differential Privacy	2019	SIGMOD	8.6206562e-05
3,329	Answering Range Queries Under Local Differential Privacy	2019	SIGMOD	7.4187944e-05

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