Floating Point Repository

This repository was created in order to contain work related to floating point precision
problems in differentially private mechanisms (hence the very general repository name).
As of now, this is just my implementation
of the snapping mechanism introduced in Mironov (2012)

Snapping Mechanism

The snapping mechanism is a differentially private mechanism designed to address the vulnerabilities that arise when implementing the laplace mechanism
with floating point numbers.

Implementation

The implementation of the snapping mechanism is located at `snapping_mechanism/implementation/cc_snap.py`.

Notes

The original Mironov (2012) focuses primarily on theory, rather than
how to use/implement the snapping mechanism in practice. The `snapping_mechanism/notes/snapping_implementation_notes.pdf` document both provides a bit of background
on the snapping mechanism and details considerations that were made during the implementation.

Reading Group Presentation

`snapping_mechanism/reading_group_presentation/presentation.pdf`
is a set of slides I used for a reading group presentation for the Harvard Privacy Tools Project.
I do not really plan on updating these and I think they're basically superseded by the notes document.

State of Completion

The python implementation is more-or-less complete at this point, though it has not been thoroughly vetted
and could surely be improved.
I do not currently recommend that anyone use this for sensitive data, though it is my goal to get it to this level.

The notes section is a work in progress and has been partially vetted.