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We consider the estimation of a density at a fixed point under a local differential privacy constraint, where the observations are anonymised before being available for statistical inference. We propose both a privatised version of a projection density estimator as well as a kernel density estimator and derive their minimax rates under a privacy constraint. There is a twofold deterioration of the minimax rates due to the anonymisation, which we show to be unavoidable by providing lower bounds. In both estimation procedures a tuning parameter has to be chosen. We suggest a variant of the classical Goldenshluger-Lepski method for choosing the bandwidth and the cut-off dimension, respectively, and analyse its performance. It provides adaptive minimax-optimal (up to log-factors) estimators. We discuss in detail how the lower and upper bound depend on the privacy constraints, which in turn is reflected by a modification of the adaptive method.

In the inverse Gaussian sequence space model with additional noisy observations of the operator, we derive nonasymptotic minimax radii of testing for ellipsoid-type alternatives simultaneously for both the signal detection problem (testing against zero) and the goodness-of-fit testing problem (testing against a prescribed sequence) without any regularity assumption on the null hypothesis. The radii are the maximum of two terms, each of which only depends on one of the noise levels. Interestingly, the term involving the noise level of the operator explicitly depends on the null hypothesis and vanishes in the signal detection case. The minimax radii are established by first showing a lower bound for arbitrary null hypotheses and noise levels. For the upper bound we consider two testing procedures, a direct test based on estimating the energy in the image space and an indirect test. Under mild assumptions, we prove that the testing radius of the indirect test achieves the lower bound, which shows the minimax optimality of the radius and the test. We highlight the assumptions under which the direct test also performs optimally. Furthermore, we apply a classical Bonferroni method for making both the indirect and the direct test adaptive with respect to the regularity of the alternative. The radii of the adaptive tests are deteriorated by an additional log-factor, which we show to be unavoidable. The results are illustrated considering Sobolev spaces and mildly or severely ill-posed inverse problems.

In a circular convolution model, we aim to infer on the density of a circular random variable using observations contaminated by an additive measurement error. We highlight the interplay of the two problems: optimal testing and quadratic functional estimation. Under general regularity assumptions, we determine an upper bound for the minimax risk of estimation for the quadratic functional. The upper bound consists of two terms, one that mimics a classical bias-variance trade-off and a second that causes the typical elbow effect in quadratic functional estimation. Using a minimax optimal estimator of the quadratic functional as a test statistic, we derive an upper bound for the nonasymptotic minimax radius of testing for nonparametric alternatives. Interestingly, the term causing the elbow effect in the estimation case vanishes in the radius of testing. We provide a matching lower bound for the testing problem. By showing that any lower bound for the testing problem also yields a lower bound for the quadratic functional estimation problem, we obtain a lower bound for the risk of estimation. Lastly, we prove a matching lower bound for the term causing the elbow effect in the estimation problem. The results are illustrated considering Sobolev spaces and ordinary or super smooth error densities.