Related papers: Statistical Imaginaries, State Legitimacy: Grappli…
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…
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…
Data have power. As such, most discussions of data presume that records should mirror some idealized ground truth. Deviations are viewed as failure. Drawing on two ethnographic studies of state data-making in a Chinese street-level…
The U.S. Census Bureau provides an estimate of the true population as a supplement to the basic census numbers. This estimate is constructed from data in a post-censal survey. The overall procedure is referred to as dual system estimation.…
Formal disclosure avoidance techniques are necessary to ensure that published data can not be used to identify information about individuals. The addition of statistical noise to unpublished data can be implemented to achieve differential…
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…
Differentially private statistical estimation has seen a flurry of developments over the last several years. Study has been divided into two schools of thought, focusing on empirical statistics versus population statistics. We suggest that…
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…
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…
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 this paper, we propose standard statistical tools as a solution to commonly highlighted problems in the explainability literature. Indeed, leveraging statistical estimators allows for a proper definition of explanations, enabling…
Statistical agencies face a dual mandate to publish accurate statistics while protecting respondent privacy. Increasing privacy protection requires decreased accuracy. Recognizing this as a resource allocation problem, we propose an…
We investigate how individuals form expectations about population behavior using statistical inference based on observations of their social relations. Misperceptions about others' connectedness and behavior arise from sampling bias…
The study of opinions $-$ e.g., their formation and change, and their effects on our society $-$ by means of theoretical and numerical models has been one of the main goals of sociophysics until now, but it is one of the defining topics…
The eruption of big data with the increasing collection and processing of vast volumes and variety of data have led to breakthrough discoveries and innovation in science, engineering, medicine, commerce, criminal justice, and national…
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…
Although information theory resolves inconsistencies (known under the form of famous enigmas) of the traditional approach of thermostatistics, its place in the corresponding literature is not what it deserves. This article supports the idea…
Government agencies typically need to take potential risks of disclosure into account whenever they publish statistics based on their data or give external researchers access to collected data. In this context, the promise of formal privacy…
Differential Privacy (DP) provides an elegant mathematical framework for defining a provable disclosure risk in the presence of arbitrary adversaries; it guarantees that whether an individual is in a database or not, the results of a DP…
Data collected about individuals is regularly used to make decisions that impact those same individuals. We consider settings where sensitive personal data is used to decide who will receive resources or benefits. While it is well known…