Algorithms such as Differentially Private SGD enable training machine
learning models with formal privacy guarantees. However, there is a discrepancy
between the protection that such algorithms guarantee in theory and the
protection they afford in practice. An emerging strand of work empirically
estimates the protection afforded by differentially private training as a
confidence interval for the privacy budget $\varepsilon$ spent on training a
model. Existing approaches derive confidence intervals for $\varepsilon$ from
confidence intervals for the false positive and false negative rates of
membership inference attacks. Unfortunately, obtaining narrow high-confidence
intervals for $\epsilon$ using this method requires an impractically large
sample size and training as many models as samples. We propose a novel Bayesian
method that greatly reduces sample size, and adapt and validate a heuristic to
draw more than one sample per trained model. Our Bayesian method exploits the
hypothesis testing interpretation of differential privacy to obtain a posterior
for $\varepsilon$ (not just a confidence interval) from the joint posterior of
the false positive and false negative rates of membership inference attacks.
For the same sample size and confidence, we derive confidence intervals for
$\varepsilon$ around 40% narrower than prior work. The heuristic, which we
adapt from label-only DP, can be used to further reduce the number of trained
models needed to get enough samples by up to 2 orders of magnitude.