Related papers: Geographic Spines in the 2020 Census Disclosure Av…
The U.S. Census Bureau is using differential privacy (DP) to protect confidential respondent data collected for the 2020 Decennial Census of Population & Housing. The Census Bureau's DP system is implemented in the Disclosure Avoidance…
Moving loads such as cars and trains are very useful sources of seismic waves, which can be analyzed to retrieve information on the seismic velocity of subsurface materials using the techniques of ambient noise seismology. This information…
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…
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…
A key tool for building differentially private systems is adding Gaussian noise to the output of a function evaluated on a sensitive dataset. Unfortunately, using a continuous distribution presents several practical challenges. First and…
In this paper, we tackle the problem of constructing a differentially private synopsis for two-dimensional datasets such as geospatial datasets. The current state-of-the-art methods work by performing recursive binary partitioning of the…
We propose Bayesian methods to assess the statistical disclosure risk of data released under zero-concentrated differential privacy, focusing on settings with a strong hierarchical structure and categorical variables with many levels. Risk…
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…
The US Decennial Census provides valuable data for both research and policy purposes. Census data are subject to a variety of disclosure avoidance techniques prior to release in order to preserve respondent confidentiality. While many are…
This paper is motivated by applications of a Census Bureau interested in releasing aggregate socio-economic data about a large population without revealing sensitive information about any individual. The released information can be the…
In recent years, Gaussian noise has become a popular tool in differentially private algorithms, often replacing Laplace noise which dominated the early literature. Gaussian noise is the standard approach to $\textit{approximate}$…
Emerging discussions on the responsible government use of algorithmic technologies propose transparency and public participation as key mechanisms for preserving accountability and trust. But in practice, the adoption and use of any…
An imprecise region is referred to as a geographical area without a clearly-defined boundary in the literature. Previous clustering-based approaches exploit spatial information to find such regions. However, the prior studies suffer from…
Poisson subsampling is the default sampling scheme in differentially private machine learning, largely because its unstructured randomness yields tractable privacy amplification analyses. Yet this same randomness introduces substantial…
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…
We show that individual, confidential microdata records from the 2010 U.S. Census of Population and Housing can be accurately reconstructed from the published tabular summaries. Ninety-seven million person records (every resident in 70% of…
This article presents a weakly supervised machine learning method, which we call DAS-N2N, for suppressing strong random noise in distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) recordings. DAS-N2N requires no manually produced labels (i.e.,…
The paper aims to give an overview of various approaches to statistical disclosure control based on random noise that are currently being discussed for official population statistics and censuses. A particular focus is on a stringent…
When the U.S. Census Bureau announced its intention to modernize its disclosure avoidance procedures for the 2020 Census, it sparked a controversy that is still underway. The move to differential privacy introduced technical and procedural…
Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) is an emerging technology for earthquake monitoring and subsurface imaging. The recorded seismic signals by DAS have several distinct characteristics, such as unknown coupling effects, strong anthropogenic…