Abstract:   Privacy-preserving data analysis has been put on a firm mathematical foundation since the introduction of differential privacy (DP) in 2006. This privacy definition, however, has some well-known weaknesses: notably, it does not tightly handle composition. This weakness has inspired several recent relaxations of differential privacy based on the Renyi divergences. We propose an alternative relaxation we term "f-DP", which has a number of nice properties and avoids some of the difficulties associated with divergence based relaxations. First, f-DP preserves…

Abstract: We introduce the diffusion K-means clustering method on Riemannian submanifolds, which maximizes the within-cluster connectedness based on the diffusion distance. The diffusion K-means constructs a random walk on the similarity graph with vertices as data points randomly sampled on the manifolds and edges as similarities given by a kernel that captures the local geometry of manifolds. Thus the diffusion K-means is a multi-scale clustering tool that is suitable for data with non-linear and non-Euclidean geometric features in mixed dimensions. Given…

Abstract: We introduce the jackknife+, a novel method for constructing predictive confidence intervals that is robust to the distribution of the data. The jackknife+ modifies the well-known jackknife (leaveoneout cross-validation) to account for the variability in the fitted regression function when we subsample the training data. Assuming exchangeable training samples, we prove that the jackknife+ permits rigorous coverage guarantees regardless of the distribution of the data points, for any algorithm that treats the training points symmetrically (in contrast, such guarantees…

Abstract: Properties of random projections of high-dimensional probability measures are of interest in a variety of fields, including asymptotic convex geometry, and potential applications to high-dimensional statistics and data analysis.   A particular question of interest is to identify what properties of the high-dimensional measure are captured by its lower-dimensional projections.   While fluctuations of these projections have been well studied over the past decade, we describe more recent work on the tail behavior of such projections, and various implications.  This talk is based on…

Abstract: We develop nonasymptotic concentration bounds for products of independent random matrices. Such products arise in the study of stochastic algorithms, linear dynamical systems, and random walks on groups. Our bounds exactly match those available for scalar random variables and continue the program, initiated by Ahlswede-Winter and Tropp, of extending familiar concentration bounds to the noncommutative setting. Our proof technique relies on geometric properties of the Schatten trace class. Joint work with D. Huang, J. A. Tropp, and R. Ward.…