Tony Cai, Abhinav Chakraborty, and Lasse Vuursteen
Distributed privacy-preserving estimators are proposed and their risk properties are investigated. Matching minimax lower bounds, up to a logarithmic factor, are established for both global and pointwise estimation. Together, these findings shed light on the tradeoff between statistical accuracy and privacy preservation. In particular, we characterize the compromise not only in terms of the privacy budget but also concerning the loss incurred by distributing data within the privacy framework as a whole. This insight captures the folklore wisdom that it is easier to retain privacy in larger samples, and explores the differences between pointwise and global estimation under distributed privacy constraints.