Unified lower bounds for interactive high-dimensional estimation under information constraints

We consider the problem of parameter estimation under local information constraints, where the estimation algorithm has access to only limited information about each sample. These constraints can be of various types, including communication constraints, where each sample must be described using a few (e.g., constant number of) bits; (local) privacy constraints, where each sample is obtained from a different user and the users seek to reveal as little as possible about their specific data; as well as many others, e.g., noisy communication channels, or limited types of data access such as linear measurements. Such problems have received a lot of attention in recent years, motivated by applications such as data analytics in distributed systems and federated learning. Our main focus is on information-theoretic lower bounds for the minimax error rates (or, equivalently, the sample complexity) of these problems. Several recent works have provided different bounds that apply to specific constraints or work for specific parametric estimation problems, sometimes without allowing for interactive protocols. Indeed, handling interactive protocols is technically challenging, and several results in prior work exhibit flaws in their analysis. In particular, even the most basic Gaussian mean estimation problem using interactive communication remains, quite surprisingly, open. We present general, "plug-and-play" lower bounds for parametric estimation under information constraints that can be used for any local information constraint and allows for interactive protocols. Our abstract bound requires very simple (and natural) assumptions to hold for the underlying parametric family; in particular, we do not require technical "regularity" conditions that are common in asymptotic statistics.