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Differentially Private Covariate Balancing Causal Inference

2024/10/18 by Yuki Ohnishi, Ohnishi, Yuki, Jordan Awan +1 · 1 citation
Mathematics · #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Methodology (stat.ME) #Statistical Methods and Bayesian Inference

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2410.14789

openalex publication_date 2024/10/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Differential privacy is the leading mathematical framework for privacy protection, providing a probabilistic guarantee that safeguards individuals' private information when publishing statistics from a dataset. This guarantee is achieved by applying a randomized algorithm to the original data, which introduces unique challenges in data analysis by distorting inherent patterns. In particular, causal inference using observational data in privacy-sensitive contexts is challenging because it requires covariate balance between treatment groups, yet checking the true covariates is prohibited to prevent leakage of sensitive information. In this article, we present a differentially private two-stage covariate balancing weighting estimator to infer causal effects from observational data. Our algorithm produces both point and interval estimators with statistical guarantees, such as consistency and rate optimality, under a given privacy budget.

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