Geometry-Adaptive Mechanisms for Private Synthetic Data

Abstract

Generating differentially private synthetic data with meaningful Wasserstein utility guarantees is challenging in high dimensions. For datasets of size \(n\) on $[0,1]^d$ with $d\ge2$, existing pure \(\varepsilon\)-differentially private mechanisms achieve expected $1$-Wasserstein error of order $(\varepsilon n)^{-1/d}$, reflecting the curse of dimensionality. While this rate is optimal in the worst case, it can be overly pessimistic when the data are supported on a lower-dimensional set. We formalize this through a multiscale packing-growth dimension $k$, which captures the geometric complexity of the support via the growth of packing numbers across scales. We propose \emph{Adaptive Pruned-PMM}, a pure $\varepsilon$-differentially private mechanism that combines private depth selection with our pruned variant of the Private Measure Mechanism (PMM) of He et al.\ (2023). The mechanism supports deeper, geometry-adapted hierarchies with expected running time $O\!\left(d(n+d)\log(\varepsilon n)\right)$, which is near-linear in $n$ for fixed dimension and privacy budget. Under an external multiscale packing-growth condition with dimension $k$, we show that, for fixed positive privacy budgets and fixed geometry, the expected $1$-Wasserstein error is of order $(\varepsilon n)^{-1/k}$ for $k>1$ as $n$ grows. We also prove a lower bound under a corresponding internal packing-growth condition, showing that the exponent $1/k$ is sharp within this framework.

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