Communication Complexity in Locally Private Distribution Estimation and Heavy Hitters

We consider the problems of distribution estimation and heavy hitter (frequency) estimation under privacy and communication constraints. While these constraints have been studied separately, optimal schemes for one are sub-optimal for the other. We propose a sample-optimal varepsilon-locally differentially private (LDP) scheme for distribution estimation, where each user communicates only one bit, and requires no public randomness. We show that Hadamard Response, a recently proposed scheme for varepsilon-LDP distribution estimation is also utility-optimal for heavy hitter estimation. Finally, we show that unlike distribution estimation, without public randomness where only one bit suffices, any heavy hitter estimation algorithm that communicates o(min log n, log k) bits from each user cannot be optimal.