{domain:"www.qualitydigest.com",server:"169.47.211.87"} Skip to main content

User account menu
Main navigation
  • Topics
    • Customer Care
    • FDA Compliance
    • Healthcare
    • Innovation
    • Lean
    • Management
    • Metrology
    • Operations
    • Risk Management
    • Six Sigma
    • Standards
    • Statistics
    • Supply Chain
    • Sustainability
    • Training
  • Videos/Webinars
    • All videos
    • Product Demos
    • Webinars
  • Advertise
    • Advertise
    • Submit B2B Press Release
    • Write for us
  • Metrology Hub
  • Training
  • Subscribe
  • Log in
Mobile Menu
  • Home
  • Topics
    • 3D Metrology-CMSC
    • Customer Care
    • FDA Compliance
    • Healthcare
    • Innovation
    • Lean
    • Management
    • Metrology
    • Operations
    • Risk Management
    • Six Sigma
    • Standards
    • Statistics
    • Supply Chain
    • Sustainability
    • Training
  • Login / Subscribe
  • More...
    • All Features
    • All News
    • All Videos
    • Contact
    • Training

Counting Queries: Extracting Key Business Metrics From Datasets

How to achieve differential privacy with common counting queries

David Darais
Joseph Near
Wed, 04/21/2021 - 12:03
  • Comment
  • RSS

Social Sharing block

  • Print
All articles in this series
Differential Privacy for Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis
Threat Models for Differential Privacy
Counting Queries: Extracting Key Business Metrics From Datasets
Summation and Average Queries: Detecting Trends in Your Data
Workloads of Counting Queries: Enabling Rich Statistical Analyses With Differential Privacy
Differential Privacy Bugs and Why They’re Hard to Find
Body

How many people drink pumpkin spice lattes in October, and how would you calculate this without learning specifically who is drinking them, and who is not?

ADVERTISEMENT

Although they seem simple or trivial, counting queries are used extremely often. Counting queries such as histograms can express many useful business metrics. How many transactions took place last week? How did this compare to the previous week? Which market has produced the most sales? In fact, one paper showed that more than half of queries written at Uber in 2016 were counting queries.

Counting queries are often the basis for more complicated analyses, too. For example, the U.S. Census releases data that are constructed essentially by issuing many counting queries over sensitive raw data collected from residents. Each of these queries belongs in the class of counting queries we will discuss below and computes the number of people living in the United States with a particular set of properties (e.g., living in a certain geographic area, having a particular income, belonging to a particular demographic).

 …

Want to continue?
Log in or create a FREE account.
Enter your username or email address
Enter the password that accompanies your username.
By logging in you agree to receive communication from Quality Digest. Privacy Policy.
Create a FREE account
Forgot My Password

Add new comment

Image CAPTCHA
Enter the characters shown in the image.
Please login to comment.
      

© 2025 Quality Digest. Copyright on content held by Quality Digest or by individual authors. Contact Quality Digest for reprint information.
“Quality Digest" is a trademark owned by Quality Circle Institute Inc.

footer
  • Home
  • Print QD: 1995-2008
  • Print QD: 2008-2009
  • Videos
  • Privacy Policy
  • Write for us
footer second menu
  • Subscribe to Quality Digest
  • About Us
  • Contact Us