Privacy amplification by subsampling: tight analyses via couplings and divergences

Differential privacy comes equipped with multiple analytical tools for the design of private data analyses. One important tool is the so-called "privacy amplification by subsampling" principle, which ensures that a differentially private mechanism run on a random subsample of a population provides higher privacy guarantees than when run on the entire population. Several instances of this principle have been studied for different random subsampling methods, each with an ad-hoc analysis. In this paper we present a general method that recovers and improves prior analyses, yields lower bounds and derives new instances of privacy amplification by subsampling. Our method leverages a characterization of differential privacy as a divergence which emerged in the program verification community. Furthermore, it introduces new tools, including advanced joint convexity and privacy profiles, which might be of independent interest.