Related papers: The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System TopDow…
In an era where external data and computational capabilities far exceed statistical agencies' own resources and capabilities, they face the renewed challenge of protecting the confidentiality of underlying microdata when publishing…
This paper presents a novel method for generating differentially private tabular datasets for hierarchical data, specifically focusing on origin-destination (O/D) trips. The approach builds upon the TopDown algorithm, a constraint-based…
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…
This paper introduces the first provably accurate algorithms for differentially private, top-down decision tree learning in the distributed setting (Balcan et al., 2012). We propose DP-TopDown, a general privacy preserving decision tree…
Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is an emergent field that aims to discover topological information hidden in a dataset. TDA tools have been commonly used to create filters and topological descriptors to improve Machine Learning (ML)…
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…
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…
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…
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a popular topic modeling technique for hidden semantic discovery of text data and serves as a fundamental tool for text analysis in various applications. However, the LDA model as well as the training…
The U.S. Decennial Census serves as the foundation for many high-profile policy decision-making processes, including federal funding allocation and redistricting. In 2020, the Census Bureau adopted differential privacy to protect the…
Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is an emergent field that aims to discover topological information hidden in a dataset. TDA tools have been commonly used to create filters and topological descriptors to improve Machine Learning (ML)…
This paper is the first to attempt differentially private (DP) topological data analysis (TDA), producing near-optimal private persistence diagrams. We analyze the sensitivity of persistence diagrams in terms of the bottleneck distance, and…
We propose a numerical accountant for evaluating the tight $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-privacy loss for algorithms with discrete one dimensional output. The method is based on the privacy loss distribution formalism and it uses the recently…
In recent years, the growth of data across various sectors, including healthcare, security, finance, and education, has created significant opportunities for analysis and informed decision-making. However, these datasets often contain…
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…
The threat of reconstruction attacks has led the U.S. Census Bureau (USCB) to replace in the Decennial Census 2020 the traditional statistical disclosure limitation based on rank swapping with one based on differential privacy (DP), leading…
The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS) is a formally private mechanism that first adds independent noise to cross tabulations for a set of pre-specified hierarchical geographic units, which is known as the geographic spine. After…
Motivated by the 2020 US Census products, this paper extends differential privacy (DP) to address the joint release of DP outputs and nonprivate statistics, referred to as invariant. Our framework, Semi-DP, redefines adjacency by focusing…
In "Differential Perspectives: Epistemic Disconnects Surrounding the US Census Bureau's Use of Differential Privacy," boyd and Sarathy argue that empirical evaluations of the Census Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS), including our published…
Privacy-preserving data aggregation in ad hoc networks is a challenging problem, considering the distributed communication and control requirement, dynamic network topology, unreliable communication links, etc. Different from the widely…