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Abstract
Many forms of sensitive data, such as web traffic, mobility data, or hospital
occupancy, are inherently sequential. The standard method for training machine
learning models while ensuring privacy for units of sensitive information, such
as individual hospital visits, is differentially private stochastic gradient
descent (DP-SGD). However, we observe in this work that the formal guarantees
of DP-SGD are incompatible with time series specific tasks like forecasting,
since they rely on the privacy amplification attained by training on small,
unstructured batches sampled from an unstructured dataset. In contrast, batches
for forecasting are generated by (1) sampling sequentially structured time
series from a dataset, (2) sampling contiguous subsequences from these series,
and (3) partitioning them into context and ground-truth forecast windows. We
theoretically analyze the privacy amplification attained by this structured
subsampling to enable the training of forecasting models with sound and tight
event- and user-level privacy guarantees. Towards more private models, we
additionally prove how data augmentation amplifies privacy in self-supervised
training of sequence models. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that
amplification by structured subsampling enables the training of forecasting
models with strong formal privacy guarantees.