We study privately releasing column sums of a $d$-dimensional table with entries from a universe $\chi$ undergoing $T$ row updates, called histogram under continual release. Our mechanisms give better additive $\ell_\infty$-error than existing mechanisms for a large class of queries and input streams. Our first contribution is an output-sensitive mechanism in the insertions-only model ($\chi = \\{0,1\\}$) for maintaining (i) the histogram or (ii) queries that do not require maintaining the entire histogram, such as the maximum or minimum column sum, the median, or any quantiles. The mechanism has an additive error of $O(d\log^2 (dq^*)+\log T)$ whp, where $q^*$ is the maximum output value over all time steps on this dataset. The mechanism does not require $q^*$ as input. This breaks the $\Omega(d \log T)$ bound of prior work when $q^* \ll T$. Our second contribution is a mechanism for the turnstile model that admits negative entry updates ($\chi = \\{-1, 0,1\\}$). This mechanism has an additive error of $O(d \log^2 (dK) + \log T)$ whp, where $K$ is the number of times two consecutive data rows differ, and the mechanism does not require $K$ as input. This is useful when monitoring inputs that only vary under unusual circumstances. For $d=1$ this gives the first private mechanism with error $O(\log^2 K + \log T)$ for continual counting in the turnstile model, improving on the $O(\log^2 n + \log T)$ error bound by Dwork, Naor, Reingold, Rothblum (ASIACRYPT 2015), where $n$ is the number of ones in the stream, as well as allowing negative entries, while Dwork et al. (2015) can only handle nonnegative entries ($\chi=\\{0,1\\}$).

We study the problem of indexing a text T[1..n] ∈ Σn so that, later, given a query regular expression pattern R of size m = |R|, we can report all the occ substrings T[i..j] of T matching R. The problem is known to be hard for arbitrary patterns R, so in this paper, we consider the following two types of patterns. (1) Character-class Kleene-star patterns of the form P1D∗P2, where P1 and P2 are strings and D = {c1, . . ., ck} ⊂ Σ is a character-class (shorthand for the regular expression (c1|c2|··· |ck)) and (2) String Kleene-star patterns of the form P1P∗P2 where P, P1 and P2 are strings. In case (1), we describe an index of O(nlog1+ε n) space (for any constant ε > 0) solving queries in time O(m + log n/log log n + occ) on constant-sized alphabets. We also describe a general solution for any alphabet size. This result is conditioned on the existence of an anchor: a character of P1P2 that does not belong to D. We justify this assumption by proving that no efficient indexing solution can exist if an anchor is not present unless the Set Disjointness Conjecture fails. In case (2), we describe an index of size O(n) answering queries in time O(m + (occ + 1) logε n) on any alphabet size.

Differential privacy is the gold standard for privacy in data analysis. In many data analysis applications, the data is a database of documents. For databases consisting of many documents, one of the most fundamental problems is that of pattern matching and computing (i) how often a pattern appears as a substring in the database ( substring counting ) and (ii) how many documents in the collection contain the pattern as a substring ( document counting ). In this paper, we initiate the theoretical study of substring and document counting under differential privacy. We give an ε-differentially private data structure solving this problem for all patterns simultaneously with a maximum additive error of O(𝓁 • polylog(n𝓁|Σ|)), where 𝓁 is the maximum length of a document in the database, n is the number of documents, and |Σ| is the size of the alphabet. We show that this is optimal up to a O(polylog(𝓃𝓁)) factor. Further, we show that for (ε,δ)-differential privacy, the bound for document counting can be improved to O(√𝓁 • polylog(𝓃𝓁|Σ|)). Additionally, our data structures are efficient. In particular, our data structures use O(𝓃𝓁 2 ) space, O(𝓃 2 𝓁 4 ) preprocessing time, and O(|P|) query time where P is the query pattern. Along the way, we develop a new technique for differentially privately computing a general class of counting functions on trees of independent interest. Our data structures immediately lead to improved algorithms for related problems, such as privately mining frequent substrings and q -grams. For q -grams, we further improve the preprocessing time of the data structure.

We study differentially private algorithms for analyzing graph databases in the challenging setting of continual release with fully dynamic updates, where edges are inserted and deleted over time, and the algorithm is required to update the solution at every time step. Previous work has presented differentially private algorithms for many graph problems that can handle insertions only or deletions only (called partially dynamic algorithms) and obtained some hardness results for the fully dynamic setting. The only algorithms in the latter setting were for the edge count, given by Fichtenberger, Henzinger, and Ost (ESA '21), and for releasing the values of all graph cuts, given by Fichtenberger, Henzinger, and Upadhyay (ICML '23). We provide the first differentially private and fully dynamic graph algorithms for several other fundamental graph statistics (including the triangle count, the number of connected components, the size of the maximum matching, and the degree histogram), analyze their error, and show strong lower bounds on the error for all algorithms in this setting. Previously, only lower bounds for purely differentially private algorithms were known; our lower bounds give an exponential improvement in terms of the dependence on the number of time steps, while applying to algorithms satisfying pure as well as approximate differential privacy. We study two variants of edge differential privacy for fully dynamic graph algorithms: event-level and item-level. Under the former notion, two graph database update sequences are considered neighboring if, roughly speaking, they differ in at most one update; under the latter notion, they can differ only in updates pertaining to one edge. Differential privacy requires that for any two neighboring inputs, the output distributions of the algorithm are close. We give upper and lower bounds on the error of both---event-level and item-level---fully dynamic algorithms for several fundamental graph problems. No fully dynamic algorithms that are private at the item-level (the more stringent of the two notions) were known before. In the case of item-level privacy, for several problems, our algorithms match our lower bounds.

Privately counting distinct elements in a stream is a fundamental data analysis problem with many applications in machine learning. In the turnstile model, Jain et al. [NeurIPS2023] initiated the study of this problem parameterized by the maximum flippancy of any element, i.e., the number of times that the count of an element changes from 0 to above 0 or vice versa. They give an item-level $(ε,δ)$-differentially private algorithm whose additive error is tight with respect to that parameterization. In this work, we show that a very simple algorithm based on the sparse vector technique achieves a tight additive error for item-level $(ε,δ)$-differential privacy and item-level $ε$-differential privacy with regards to a different parameterization, namely the sum of all flippancies. Our second result is a bound which shows that for a large class of algorithms, including all existing differentially private algorithms for this problem, the lower bound from item-level differential privacy extends to event-level differential privacy. This partially answers an open question by Jain et al. [NeurIPS2023].

Originating from the work of Navarro and Thankachan [TCS 2016], the problem of consecutive pattern matching is a variant of the fundamental pattern matching problem, where one is given a text and a pair of patterns, and must compute their consecutive occurrences in the text. Assuming that the text is given as a straight-line program, we develop an algorithm that computes all consecutive occurrences in optimal time.

Differential privacy is the de facto privacy standard in data analysis and widely researched in various application areas. On the other hand, analyzing sequences, or strings, is essential to many modern data analysis tasks, and those data often include highly sensitive personal data. While the problem of sanitizing sequential data to protect privacy has received growing attention, there is a surprising lack of theoretical studies of algorithms analyzing sequential data that preserve differential privacy while giving provable guarantees on the accuracy of such an algorithm. The goal of this paper is to initiate such a study. Specifically, in this paper, we consider the k-approximate pattern matching problem under differential privacy, where the goal is to report or count all substrings of a given string S which have a Hamming distance at most k to a pattern P, or decide whether such a substring exists. In our definition of privacy, individual positions of the string S are protected. To be able to answer queries under differential privacy, we allow some slack on k, i.e. we allow reporting or counting substrings of S with a distance at most (1+γ)k+α to P, for a multiplicative error γ and an additive error α. We analyze which values of α and γ are necessary or sufficient to solve the k-approximate pattern matching problem while satisfying ε-differential privacy. Let n denote the length of S. We give - an ε-differentially private algorithm with an additive error of O(ε^{-1}log n) and no multiplicative error for the existence variant; - an ε-differentially private algorithm with an additive error O(ε^{-1}max(k,log n)⋅log n) for the counting variant; - an ε-differentially private algorithm with an additive error of O(ε^{-1}log n) and multiplicative error O(1) for the reporting variant for a special class of patterns. The error bounds hold with high probability. All of these algorithms return a witness, that is, if there exists a substring of S with distance at most k to P, then the algorithm returns a substring of S with distance at most (1+γ)k+α to P. Further, we complement these results by a lower bound, showing that any algorithm for the existence variant which also returns a witness must have an additive error of Ω(ε^{-1}log n) with constant probability.

Differential privacy with gradual expiration models the setting where data items arrive in a stream and at a given time $t$ the privacy loss guaranteed for a data item seen at time $(t-d)$ is $\epsilon g(d)$, where $g$ is a monotonically non-decreasing function. We study the fundamental *continual (binary) counting* problem where each data item consists of a bit and the algorithm needs to output at each time step the sum of all the bits streamed so far. For a stream of length $T$ and privacy *without* expiration continual counting is possible with maximum (over all time steps) additive error $O(\log^2(T)/\varepsilon)$ and the best known lower bound is $\Omega(\log(T)/\varepsilon)$; closing this gap is a challenging open problem. We show that the situation is very different for privacy with gradual expiration by giving upper and lower bounds for a large set of expiration functions $g$. Specifically, our algorithm achieves an additive error of $O(\log(T)/\epsilon)$ for a large set of privacy expiration functions. We also give a lower bound that shows that if $C$ is the additive error of any $\epsilon$-DP algorithm for this problem, then the product of $C$ and the privacy expiration function after $2C$ steps must be $\Omega(\log(T)/\epsilon)$. Our algorithm matches this lower bound as its additive error is $O(\log(T)/\epsilon)$, even when $g(2C) = O(1)$. Our empirical evaluation shows that we achieve a slowly growing privacy loss that has significantly smaller empirical privacy loss for large values of $d$ than a natural baseline algorithm.

In Gapped String Indexing, the goal is to compactly represent a string $S$ of length $n$ such that for any query consisting of two strings $P_1$ and $P_2$, called patterns, and an integer interval $[α, β]$, called gap range, we can quickly find occurrences of $P_1$ and $P_2$ in $S$ with distance in $[α, β]$. Gapped String Indexing is a central problem in computational biology and text mining and has thus received significant research interest, including parameterized and heuristic approaches. Despite this interest, the best-known time-space trade-offs for Gapped String Indexing are the straightforward $O(n)$ space and $O(n+occ)$ query time or $Ω(n^2)$ space and $\tilde{O}(|P_1| + |P_2| + occ)$ query time. We break through this barrier obtaining the first interesting trade-offs with polynomially subquadratic space and polynomially sublinear query time. In particular, we show that, for every $0\leq δ\leq 1$, there is a data structure for Gapped String Indexing with either $\tilde{O}(n^{2-δ/3})$ or $\tilde{O}(n^{3-2δ})$ space and $\tilde{O}(|P_1| + |P_2| + n^δ\cdot (occ+1))$ query time, where $occ$ is the number of reported occurrences. As a new tool towards obtaining our main result, we introduce the Shifted Set Intersection problem. We show that this problem is equivalent to the indexing variant of 3SUM (3SUM Indexing). Via a series of reductions, we obtain a solution to the Gapped String Indexing problem. Furthermore, we enhance our data structure for deciding Shifted Set Intersection, so that we can support the reporting variant of the problem. Via the obtained equivalence to 3SUM Indexing, we thus give new improved data structures for the reporting variant of 3SUM Indexing, and we show how this improves upon the state-of-the-art solution for Jumbled Indexing for any alphabet of constant size $σ>5$.

International audience

The classic string indexing problem is to preprocess a string S into a compact data structure that supports efficient pattern matching queries. Typical queries include existential queries (decide if the pattern occurs in S), reporting queries (return all positions where the pattern occurs), and counting queries (return the number of occurrences of the pattern). In this paper we consider a variant of string indexing, where the goal is to compactly represent the string such that given two patterns $$P_1$$ and $$P_2$$ and a gap range $${[}\alpha , \beta ]$$ we can quickly find the consecutive occurrences of $$P_1$$ and $$P_2$$ with distance in $${[}\alpha , \beta ]$$ , i.e., pairs of subsequent occurrences with distance within the range. We present data structures that use linear space and query time $${\widetilde{O}}(|P_1|+|P_2|+n^{2/3})$$ for existence and counting and $${\widetilde{O}}(|P_1|+|P_2|+n^{2/3}\hbox {occ}^{1/3})$$ for reporting. We complement this with a conditional lower bound based on the set intersection problem showing that any solution using $${\widetilde{O}}(n)$$ space must use $${\widetilde{\Omega }}(|P_1| + |P_2| + \sqrt{n})$$ query time. To obtain our results we develop new techniques and ideas of independent interest including a new suffix tree decomposition and hardness of a variant of the set intersection problem.

Given a string S of length n , the classic string indexing problem is to preprocess S into a compact data structure that supports efficient subsequent pattern queries. In this article, we consider the basic variant where the pattern is given in compressed form and the goal is to achieve query time that is fast in terms of the compressed size of the pattern. This captures the common client-server scenario, where a client submits a query and communicates it in compressed form to a server. Instead of the server decompressing the query before processing it, we consider how to efficiently process the compressed query directly. Our main result is a novel linear space data structure that achieves near-optimal query time for patterns compressed with the classic Lempel-Ziv 1977 (LZ77) compression scheme. Along the way, we develop several data structural techniques of independent interest, including a novel data structure that compactly encodes all LZ77 compressed suffixes of a string in linear space and a general decomposition of tries that reduces the search time from logarithmic in the size of the trie to logarithmic in the length of the pattern.

Given two strings S and P, the Episode Matching problem is to find the shortest substring of S that contains P as a subsequence. The best known upper bound for this problem is Õ(nm) by Das et al. (1997), where n,m are the lengths of S and P, respectively. Although the problem is well studied and has many applications in data mining, this bound has never been improved. In this paper we show why this is the case by proving that no O((nm)^{1-ε}) algorithm (even for binary strings) exists, unless the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH) is false. We then consider the indexing version of the problem, where S is preprocessed into a data structure for answering episode matching queries P. We show that for any τ, there is a data structure using O(n+(n/(τ)) ^k) space that answers episode matching queries for any P of length k in O(k⋅ τ ⋅ log log n) time. We complement this upper bound with an almost matching lower bound, showing that any data structure that answers episode matching queries for patterns of length k in time O(n^δ), must use Ω(n^{k-kδ-o(1)}) space, unless the Strong k-Set Disjointness Conjecture is false. Finally, for the special case of k = 2, we present a faster construction of the data structure using fast min-plus multiplication of bounded integer matrices.

The classic string indexing problem is to preprocess a string S into a compact data structure that supports efficient subsequent pattern matching queries, that is, given a pattern string P, report all occurrences of P within S. In this paper, we study a basic and natural extension of string indexing called the string indexing for top-k close consecutive occurrences problem (Sitcco). Here, a consecutive occurrence is a pair (i,j), i < j, such that P occurs at positions i and j in S and there is no occurrence of P between i and j, and their distance is defined as j-i. Given a pattern P and a parameter k, the goal is to report the top-k consecutive occurrences of P in S of minimal distance. The challenge is to compactly represent S while supporting queries in time close to the length of P and k. We give two time-space trade-offs for the problem. Let n be the length of S, m the length of P, and ε ∈ (0,1]. Our first result achieves O(nlog n) space and optimal query time of O(m+k), and our second result achieves linear space and query time O(m+k^{1+ε}). Along the way, we develop several techniques of independent interest, including a new translation of the problem into a line segment intersection problem and a new recursive clustering technique for trees.

The classic string indexing problem is to preprocess a string S into a compact data structure that supports efficient subsequent pattern matching queries, that is, given a pattern string P, report all occurrences of P within S. In this paper, we study a basic and natural extension of string indexing called the string indexing for top-k close consecutive occurrences problem (Sitcco). Here, a consecutive occurrence is a pair (i,j), i < j, such that P occurs at positions i and j in S and there is no occurrence of P between i and j, and their distance is defined as j-i. Given a pattern P and a parameter k, the goal is to report the top-k consecutive occurrences of P in S of minimal distance. The challenge is to compactly represent S while supporting queries in time close to the length of P and k. We give two time-space trade-offs for the problem. Let n be the length of S, m the length of P, and ε ∈ (0,1]. Our first result achieves O(nlog n) space and optimal query time of O(m+k), and our second result achieves linear space and query time O(m+k^{1+ε}). Along the way, we develop several techniques of independent interest, including a new translation of the problem into a line segment intersection problem and a new recursive clustering technique for trees.

Given a string S of length n, the classic string indexing problem is to preprocess S into a compact data structure that supports efficient subsequent pattern queries. In this paper we consider the basic variant where the pattern is given in compressed form and the goal is to achieve query time that is fast in terms of the compressed size of the pattern. This captures the common client-server scenario, where a client submits a query and communicates it in compressed form to a server. Instead of the server decompressing the query before processing it, we consider how to efficiently process the compressed query directly. Our main result is a novel linear space data structure that achieves near-optimal query time for patterns compressed with the classic Lempel-Ziv 1977 (LZ77) compression scheme. Along the way we develop several data structural techniques of independent interest, including a novel data structure that compactly encodes all LZ77 compressed suffixes of a string in linear space and a general decomposition of tries that reduces the search time from logarithmic in the size of the trie to logarithmic in the length of the pattern.