Related papers: Evaluation of per-record identification risk and s…

We consider swapping of two records in a microdata set for the purpose of disclosure control. We give some necessary and sufficient conditions that some observations can be swapped between two records under the restriction that a given set…

The exponential growth of collected, processed, and shared data has given rise to concerns about individuals' privacy. Consequently, various laws and regulations have been established to oversee how organizations handle and safeguard data.…

The exponential growth of collected, processed, and shared microdata has given rise to concerns about individuals' privacy. As a result, laws and regulations have emerged to control what organisations do with microdata and how they protect…

This paper proposes and compares measures of identity and attribute disclosure risk for synthetic data. Data custodians can use the methods proposed here to inform the decision as to whether to release synthetic versions of confidential…

Certain methods of analysis require the knowledge of the spatial distances between entities whose data are stored in a microdata table. For instance, such knowledge is necessary and sufficient to perform data mining tasks such as nearest…

Government statistical agencies often apply statistical disclosure limitation techniques to survey microdata to protect the confidentiality of respondents. There is a need for valid and practical ways to assess the protection provided. This…

A tremendous amount of individual-level data is generated each day, of use to marketing, decision makers, and machine learning applications. This data often contain private and sensitive information about individuals, which can be disclosed…

Statistical agencies and other institutions collect data under the promise to protect the confidentiality of respondents. When releasing microdata samples, the risk that records can be identified must be assessed. To this aim, a widely…

Responsible disclosure limitation is an iterative exercise in risk assessment and mitigation. From time to time, as disclosure risks grow and evolve and as data users' needs change, agencies must consider redesigning the disclosure…

Interpretability is often pointed out as a key requirement for trustworthy machine learning. However, learning and releasing models that are inherently interpretable leaks information regarding the underlying training data. As such…

We propose a categorical data synthesizer with a quantifiable disclosure risk. Our algorithm, named Perturbed Gibbs Sampler, can handle high-dimensional categorical data that are often intractable to represent as contingency tables. The…

Machine-learning-based entity resolution has been widely studied. However, some entity pairs may be mislabeled by machine learning models and existing studies do not study the risk analysis problem -- predicting and interpreting which…

Over the last decade, proliferation of various online platforms and their increasing adoption by billions of users have heightened the privacy risk of a user enormously. In fact, security researchers have shown that sparse microdata…

When deployed in the real world, machine learning models inevitably encounter changes in the data distribution, and certain -- but not all -- distribution shifts could result in significant performance degradation. In practice, it may make…

Changepoint detection is commonly formulated by minimizing the sum of in-sample losses to quantify the model's overall fit. However, for flexible modeling procedures -- especially those involving high-dimensional parameter spaces or…

Using real-world study data usually requires contractual agreements where research results may only be published in anonymized form. Requiring formal privacy guarantees, such as differential privacy, could be helpful for data-driven…

We present a method for identification of models with good predictive performances in the family of Bayesian log-linear mixed models with Dirichlet process random effects. Such a problem arises in many different applications; here we…

Objective: To enable privacy-preserving learning of high quality generative and discriminative machine learning models from distributed electronic health records. Methods and Results: We describe general and scalable strategy to build…

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…

Clinical free-text data offers immense potential to improve population health research such as richer phenotyping, symptom tracking, and contextual understanding of patient care. However, these data present significant privacy risks due to…