Differential privacy is becoming one gold standard for protecting the privacy
of publicly shared data. It has been widely used in social science, data
science, public health, information technology, and the U.S. decennial census.
Nevertheless, to guarantee differential privacy, existing methods may
unavoidably alter the conclusion of the original data analysis, as
privatization often changes the sample distribution. This phenomenon is known
as the trade-off between privacy protection and statistical accuracy. In this
work, we mitigate this trade-off by developing a distribution-invariant
privatization (DIP) method to reconcile both high statistical accuracy and
strict differential privacy. As a result, any downstream statistical or machine
learning task yields essentially the same conclusion as if one used the
original data. Numerically, under the same strictness of privacy protection,
DIP achieves superior statistical accuracy in a wide range of simulation
studies and real-world benchmarks.