License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2019.15
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-105916
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2019/10591/
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Andoni, Alexandr ; Malkin, Tal ; Nosatzki, Negev Shekel

Two Party Distribution Testing: Communication and Security

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LIPIcs-ICALP-2019-15.pdf (0.6 MB)


Abstract

We study the problem of discrete distribution testing in the two-party setting. For example, in the standard closeness testing problem, Alice and Bob each have t samples from, respectively, distributions a and b over [n], and they need to test whether a=b or a,b are epsilon-far (in the l_1 distance). This is in contrast to the well-studied one-party case, where the tester has unrestricted access to samples of both distributions. Despite being a natural constraint in applications, the two-party setting has previously evaded attention.
We address two fundamental aspects of the two-party setting: 1) what is the communication complexity, and 2) can it be accomplished securely, without Alice and Bob learning extra information about each other's input. Besides closeness testing, we also study the independence testing problem, where Alice and Bob have t samples from distributions a and b respectively, which may be correlated; the question is whether a,b are independent or epsilon-far from being independent. Our contribution is three-fold: 1) We show how to gain communication efficiency given more samples, beyond the information-theoretic bound on t. The gain is polynomially better than what one would obtain via adapting one-party algorithms. 2) We prove tightness of our trade-off for the closeness testing, as well as that the independence testing requires tight Omega(sqrt{m}) communication for unbounded number of samples. These lower bounds are of independent interest as, to the best of our knowledge, these are the first 2-party communication lower bounds for testing problems, where the inputs are a set of i.i.d. samples. 3) We define the concept of secure distribution testing, and provide secure versions of the above protocols with an overhead that is only polynomial in the security parameter.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{andoni_et_al:LIPIcs:2019:10591,
  author =	{Alexandr Andoni and Tal Malkin and Negev Shekel Nosatzki},
  title =	{{Two Party Distribution Testing: Communication and Security}},
  booktitle =	{46th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2019)},
  pages =	{15:1--15:16},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-109-2},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2019},
  volume =	{132},
  editor =	{Christel Baier and Ioannis Chatzigiannakis and Paola Flocchini and Stefano Leonardi},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2019/10591},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-105916},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2019.15},
  annote =	{Keywords: distribution testing, communication complexity, security}
}

Keywords: distribution testing, communication complexity, security
Collection: 46th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2019)
Issue Date: 2019
Date of publication: 04.07.2019


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