Subsampled R\'enyi Differential Privacy and Analytical Moments Accountant

We study the problem of subsampling in differential privacy (DP), a question that is the centerpiece behind many successful differentially private machine learning algorithms. Specifically, we provide a tight upper bound on the R\'enyi Differential Privacy (RDP) (Mironov, 2017) parameters for algorithms that: (1) subsample the dataset, and then (2) apply a randomized mechanism M to the subsample, in terms of the RDP parameters of M and the subsampling probability parameter. This result generalizes the classic subsampling-based "privacy amplification" property of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy that applies to only one fixed pair of $(\epsilon,\delta)$, to a stronger version that exploits properties of each specific randomized algorithm and satisfies an entire family of $(\epsilon(\delta),\delta)$-differential privacy for all $\delta\in [0,1]$. Our experiments confirm the advantage of using our techniques over keeping track of $(\epsilon,\delta)$ directly, especially in the setting where we need to compose many rounds of data access.