> This indeed seems plausible under the powerful assumption that the > underlying stat is constant.
Actually it applies to any known relative pattern, for example, that the number increases by 1 each time. > where the additive noise is applied to the center of the first bin? Yes, you can look at it like that. > I can see how this is better, since the underlying value gets > immediately smoothed by binning. However, it does give me a weird > hacky feeling... > > Is this construction something that has been used before? Well, the output here is a bin, not a number, and the “exponential mechanism” is the generalization of the Laplace mechanism to handle arbitrary output spaces (kunaltalwar.org/papers/expmech.pdf). In this case, I believe that adding Laplace noise to a bin center and then re-binning is a way to select according to the distribution that the exponential mechanism would prescribe. Aaron _______________________________________________ tor-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev
