Related papers: Negative Surveys
Many issues of interest to social scientists and policymakers are of a sensitive nature in the sense that they are intrusive, stigmatizing or incriminating to the respondent. This results in refusals to cooperate or evasive cooperation in…
Representative risk estimation is fundamental to clinical decision-making. However, risks are often estimated from non-representative epidemiologic studies, which usually underrepresent minorities. "Model-based" methods use population…
Ratio statistics--such as relative risk and odds ratios--play a central role in hypothesis testing, model evaluation, and decision-making across many areas of machine learning, including causal inference and fairness analysis. However,…
We consider the problem of conducting a survey with the goal of obtaining an unbiased estimator of some population statistic when individuals have unknown costs (drawn from a known prior) for participating in the survey. Individuals must be…
The 2021 Canadian census is notable for using a unique form of privacy, random rounding, which independently and probabilistically rounds discrete numerical attribute values. In this work, we explore how hierarchical summative correlation…
Rejection sampling is a technique for sampling from difficult distributions. However, its use is limited due to a high rejection rate. Common adaptive rejection sampling methods either work only for very specific distributions or without…
Capture-recapture methods aim to estimate the size of a closed population on the basis of multiple incomplete enumerations of individuals. In many applications, the individual probability of being recorded is heterogeneous in the…
Current research on soft-biometrics showed that privacy-sensitive information can be deduced from biometric templates of an individual. Since for many applications, these templates are expected to be used for recognition purposes only, this…
Indirect surveys, in which respondents provide information about other people they know, have been proposed for estimating (nowcasting) the size of a \emph{hidden population} where privacy is important or the hidden population is hard to…
This paper considers how to elicit information from sensitive survey questions. First we thoroughly evaluate list experiments (LE), a leading method in the experimental literature on sensitive questions. Our empirical results demonstrate…
Identifying which variables do influence a response while controlling false positives pervades statistics and data science. In this paper, we consider a scenario in which we only have access to summary statistics, such as the values of…
With the increasing amount of data in society, privacy concerns in data sharing have become widely recognized. Particularly, protecting personal attribute information is essential for a wide range of aims from crowdsourcing to realizing…
Researchers in many scientific fields make inferences from individuals to larger groups. For many groups however, there is no list of members from which to take a random sample. Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a relatively new sampling…
Several official statistics agencies release synthetic data as public use microdata files. In practice, synthetic data do not admit accurate results for every analysis. Thus, it is beneficial for agencies to provide users with feedback on…
Population size estimates for hidden and hard-to-reach populations are particularly important when members are known to suffer from disproportion health issues or to pose health risks to the larger ambient population in which they are…
We provide a detailed study of the estimation of probability distributions---discrete and continuous---in a stringent setting in which data is kept private even from the statistician. We give sharp minimax rates of convergence for…
This paper deals with the estimation of population sizes for respondent-driven sampling (RDS), a variant of link-tracing sampling that leverages social networks over a number of waves to recruit individuals from hidden populations. The RDS…
Learning from implicit user feedback is challenging as we can only observe positive samples but never access negative ones. Most conventional methods cope with this issue by adopting a pairwise ranking approach with negative sampling.…
Feature selection is the process of sieving features, in which informative features are separated from the redundant and irrelevant ones. This process plays an important role in machine learning, data mining and bioinformatics. However,…
The recent proliferation of computers and the internet have opened new opportunities for collecting and processing data. However, such data are often obtained without a well-planned probability survey design. Such non-probability based…