Improved Lower Bound for Differentially Private Facility Location

Information Processing Letters, 187 (2025)

Abstract

We consider the differentially private (DP) facility location problem in the so called super-set output setting proposed by Gupta et al. [GLM+10]. The current best known expected approximation ratio for an ε-DP algorithm is O(log n / √ε) due to Cohen-Addad et al. [CEF+22] where n denote the size of the metric space, meanwhile the best known lower bound is Ω(1/√ε) [EGLW19].

In this short note, we give a lower bound of Ω(min{log n, √(log n/ε)}) on the expected approximation ratio of any ε-DP algorithm, which is the first evidence that the approximation ratio has to grow with the size of the metric space.