Local differential privacy is a differential privacy paradigm in which individuals first apply a privacy mechanism to their data (often by adding noise) before transmitting the result to a curator. The noise for privacy results in additional bias and variance in their analyses. Thus it is of great importance for analysts to incorporate the privacy noise into valid inference. In this article, we develop methodologies to infer causal effects from locally privatized data under randomized experiments. First, we present frequentist estimators under various privacy scenarios with their variance estimators and plug-in confidence intervals. We show a naïve debiased estimator results in inferior mean-squared error (MSE) compared to minimax lower bounds. In contrast, we show that using a customized privacy mechanism, we can match the lower bound, giving minimax optimal inference. We also develop a Bayesian nonparametric methodology along with a blocked Gibbs sampling algorithm, which can be applied to any of our proposed privacy mechanisms, and which performs especially well in terms of MSE for tight privacy budgets. Finally, we present simulation studies to evaluate the performance of our proposed frequentist and Bayesian methodologies for various privacy budgets, resulting in useful suggestions for performing causal inference for privatized data.

One core assumption typically adopted for valid causal inference is that of no interference between experimental units, i.e., the outcome of an experimental unit is unaffected by the treatments assigned to other experimental units. This assumption can be violated in real-life experiments, which significantly complicates the task of causal inference. As the number of potential outcomes increases, it becomes challenging to disentangle direct treatment effects from “spillover” effects. Current methodologies are lacking, as they cannot handle arbitrary, unknown interference structures to permit inference on causal estimands. We present a general framework to address the limitations of existing approaches. Our framework is based on the new concept of the “degree of interference” (DoI). The DoI is a unit-level latent variable that captures the latent structure of interference. We also develop a data augmentation algorithm that adopts a blocked Gibbs sampler and Bayesian nonparametric methodology to perform inferences on the estimands under our framework. We illustrate the DoI concept and properties of our Bayesian methodology via extensive simulation studies and an analysis of a randomized experiment investigating the impact of a cash transfer program for which interference is a critical concern. Ultimately, our framework enables us to infer causal effects without strong structural assumptions on interference.

We introduce several novel change of measure inequalities for two families of divergences: $f$-divergences and $\alpha$-divergences. We show how the variational representation for $f$-divergences leads to novel change of measure inequalities. We also present a multiplicative change of measure inequality for $\alpha$-divergences and a generalized version of Hammersley-Chapman-Robbins inequality. Finally, we present several applications of our change of measure inequalities, including PAC-Bayesian bounds for various classes of losses and non-asymptotic intervals for Monte Carlo estimates.