Continual Release Moment Estimation with Differential Privacy

Nikita Kalinin, Jalaj Upadhyay, Christoph H. Lampert

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

We propose Joint Moment Estimation (JME), a method for continually and privately estimating both the first and second moments of a data stream with reduced noise compared to naive approaches. JME supports the matrix mechanism and exploits a joint sensitivity analysis to identify a privacy regime in which the second-moment estimation incurs no additional privacy cost, thereby improving accuracy while maintaining privacy. We demonstrate JME’s effectiveness in two applications: estimating the running mean and covariance matrix for Gaussian density estimation and model training with DP-Adam.