Related papers: The Effect of Data Swapping on Analyses of America…
To meet its dual burdens of providing useful statistics and ensuring privacy of individual respondents, the US Census Bureau has for decades introduced some form of "noise" into published statistics. Initially, they used a method known as…
As the U.S. Census Bureau implements its controversial new disclosure avoidance system, researchers and policymakers debate the necessity of new privacy protections for public statistics. With experiments on both public statistics and…
In 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau transitioned from data swapping to differential privacy (DP) in its approach to de-identifying decennial census data. This decision has faced considerable criticism from data users, particularly due to…
In 2017, the United States Census Bureau announced that because of high disclosure risk in the methodology (data swapping) used to produce tabular data for the 2010 census, a different protection mechanism based on differential privacy…
Most statistical agencies release randomly selected samples of Census microdata, usually with sample fractions under 10% and with other forms of statistical disclosure control (SDC) applied. An alternative to SDC is data synthesis, which…
With the recent bloom of data, there is a huge surge in threats against individuals' private information. Various techniques for optimizing privacy-preserving data analysis are at the focus of research in the recent years. In this paper, we…
Agencies, such as the U.S. Census Bureau, release data sets and statistics about groups of individuals that are used as input to a number of critical decision processes. To conform to privacy and confidentiality requirements, these agencies…
The American Community Survey (ACS) is the bedrock underpinning any analysis of the US population, urban areas included. The Census Bureau delivers the ACS data in multiple formats, yet in each the raw data is difficult to export in bulk…
In the face of increasingly severe privacy threats in the era of data and AI, the US Census Bureau has recently adopted differential privacy, the de facto standard of privacy protection for the 2020 Census release. Enforcing differential…
Decades of research suggest that information exchange in groups and organizations can reliably improve judgment accuracy in tasks such as financial forecasting, market research, and medical decision-making. However, we show that improving…
A quarter-century of statistical research has shown that census coverage surveys, valuable as they are in offering a report card on each decennial census, do not provide usable estimates of geographical differences in coverage. The…
In early 2021, the US Census Bureau will begin releasing statistical tables based on the decennial census conducted in 2020. Because of significant changes in the data landscape, the Census Bureau is changing its approach to disclosure…
The United States Census Bureau faces a difficult trade-off between the accuracy of Census statistics and the protection of individual information. We conduct the first independent evaluation of bias and noise induced by the Bureau's two…
Statistical agencies rely on sampling techniques to collect socio-demographic data crucial for policy-making and resource allocation. This paper shows that surveys of important societal relevance introduce sampling errors that unevenly…
The US Census Bureau will implement a new privacy-preserving disclosure avoidance system (DAS), which includes application of differential privacy, on the public-release 2020 census data. There are concerns that the DAS may bias small-area…
Income segregation measures the extent to which households choose to live near other households with similar incomes. Sociologists theorize that income segregation can exacerbate the impacts of income inequality, and have developed indices…
The ability to directly record human face-to-face interactions increasingly enables the development of detailed data-driven models for the spread of directly transmitted infectious diseases at the scale of individuals. Complete coverage of…
The US Census Bureau plans to protect the privacy of 2020 Census respondents through its Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS), which attempts to achieve differential privacy guarantees by adding noise to the Census microdata. By applying…
Data from the Decennial Census is published only after applying a disclosure avoidance system (DAS). Data users were shaken by the adoption of differential privacy in the 2020 DAS, a radical departure from past methods. The goal of this…
Contacts between individuals play an important role in determining how infectious diseases spread. Various methods to gather data on such contacts co-exist, from surveys to wearable sensors. Comparisons of data obtained by different methods…