A New Approach to Adaptive Data Analysis and Learning via Maximal Leakage

There is an increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The main cause seems to lie in the fundamental disconnection between theory and practice in data analysis. While the former typically relies on statistical independence, the latter is an inherently adaptive process: new hypotheses are formulated based on the outcomes of previous analyses. A recent line of work tries to mitigate these issues by enforcing constraints, such as differential privacy, that compose adaptively while degrading gracefully and thus provide statistical guarantees even in adaptive contexts. Our contribution consists in the introduction of a new approach, based on the concept of Maximal Leakage, an information-theoretic measure of leakage of information. The main result allows us to compare the probability of an event happening when adaptivity is considered with respect to the non-adaptive scenario. The bound we derive represents a generalization of the bounds used in non-adaptive scenarios (e.g., McDiarmid's inequality for $c$-sensitive functions, false discovery error control via significance level, etc.), and allows us to replicate or even improve, in certain regimes, the results obtained using Max-Information or Differential Privacy. In contrast with the line of work started by Dwork et al., our results do not rely on Differential Privacy but are, in principle, applicable to every algorithm that has a bounded leakage, including the differentially private algorithms and the ones with a short description length.