Statistical Disclosure Control For Microdata

This book on statistical disclosure control presents the theory, applications and software implementation of the traditional approach to (micro)data anonymization, including data perturbation methods, disclosure risk, data utility, information loss and methods for simulating synthetic data. Introducing readers to the R packages sdcMicro and simPop, the book also features numerous examples and exercises with solutions, as well as case studies with real-world data, accompanied by the underlying R code to allow readers to reproduce all results. The demand for and volume of data from surveys, registers or other sources containing sensible information on persons or enterprises have increased significantly over the last several years. At the same time, privacy protection principles and regulations have imposed restrictions on the access and use of individual data. Proper and secure microdata dissemination calls for the application of statistical disclosure control methods to the da ta before release. This book is intended for practitioners at statistical agencies and other national and international organizations that deal with confidential data. It will also be interesting for researchers working in statistical disclosure control and the health sciences.

Statistical disclosure control is the discipline that deals with producing statistical data that are safe enough to be released to external researchers. This book concentrates on the methodology of the area. It deals with both microdata (individual data) and tabular (aggregated) data. The book attempts to develop the theory from what can be called the paradigm of statistical confidentiality: to modify unsafe data in such a way that safe (enough) data emerge, with minimum information loss. This book discusses what safe data, are, how information loss can be measured, and how to modify the data in a (near) optimal way. Once it has been decided how to measure safety and information loss, the production of safe data from unsafe data is often a matter of solving an optimization problem. Several such problems are discussed in the book, and most of them turn out to be hard problems that can be solved only approximately. The authors present new results that have not been published before. The book is not a description of an area that is closed, but, on the contrary, one that still has many spots awaiting to be more fully explored. Some of these are indicated in the book. The book will be useful for official, social and medical statisticians and others who are involved in releasing personal or business data for statistical use. Operations researchers may be interested in the optimization problems involved, particularly for the challenges they present. Leon Willenborg has worked at the Department of Statistical Methods at Statistics Netherlands since 1983, first as a researcher and since 1989 as a senior researcher. Since 1989 his main field of research and consultancy has been statistical disclosure control. From 1996-1998 he was the project coordinator of the EU co-funded SDC project.

A reference to answer all your statistical confidentialityquestions. This handbook provides technical guidance on statisticaldisclosure control and on how to approach the problem of balancingthe need to provide users with statistical outputs and the need toprotect the confidentiality of respondents. Statistical disclosurecontrol is combined with other tools such as administrative, legaland IT in order to define a proper data dissemination strategybased on a risk management approach. The key concepts of statistical disclosure control arepresented, along with the methodology and software that can be usedto apply various methods of statistical disclosure control.Numerous examples and guidelines are also featured to illustratethe topics covered. Statistical Disclosure Control: Presents a combination of both theoretical and practicalsolutions Introduces all the key concepts and definitions involved withstatistical disclosure control. Provides a high level overview of how to approach problemsassociated with confidentiality. Provides a broad-ranging review of the methods available tocontrol disclosure. Explains the subtleties of group disclosure control. Features examples throughout the book along with case studiesdemonstrating how particular methods are used. Discusses microdata, magnitude and frequency tabular data, andremote access issues. Written by experts within leading National StatisticalInstitutes. Official statisticians, academics and market researchers whoneed to be informed and make decisions on disclosure limitationwill benefit from this book.

The aim of this book is to discuss various aspects associated with disseminating personal or business data collected in censuses or surveys or copied from administrative sources. The problem is to present the data in such a form that they are useful for statistical research and to provide sufficient protection for the individuals or businesses to whom the data refer. The major part of this book is concerned with how to define the disclosure problem and how to deal with it in practical circumstances.

The aim of this book is to give the reader a detailed introduction to the different approaches to generating multiply imputed synthetic datasets. It describes all approaches that have been developed so far, provides a brief history of synthetic datasets, and gives useful hints on how to deal with real data problems like nonresponse, skip patterns, or logical constraints. Each chapter is dedicated to one approach, first describing the general concept followed by a detailed application to a real dataset providing useful guidelines on how to implement the theory in practice. The discussed multiple imputation approaches include imputation for nonresponse, generating fully synthetic datasets, generating partially synthetic datasets, generating synthetic datasets when the original data is subject to nonresponse, and a two-stage imputation approach that helps to better address the omnipresent trade-off between analytical validity and the risk of disclosure. The book concludes with a glimpse into the future of synthetic datasets, discussing the potential benefits and possible obstacles of the approach and ways to address the concerns of data users and their understandable discomfort with using data that doesn’t consist only of the originally collected values. The book is intended for researchers and practitioners alike. It helps the researcher to find the state of the art in synthetic data summarized in one book with full reference to all relevant papers on the topic. But it is also useful for the practitioner at the statistical agency who is considering the synthetic data approach for data dissemination in the future and wants to get familiar with the topic.

Inference control in statistical databases, also known as statistical disclosure limitation or statistical confidentiality, is about finding tradeoffs to the tension between the increasing societal need for accurate statistical data and the legal and ethical obligation to protect privacy of individuals and enterprises which are the source of data for producing statistics. Techniques used by intruders to make inferences compromising privacy increasingly draw on data mining, record linkage, knowledge discovery, and data analysis and thus statistical inference control becomes an integral part of computer science. This coherent state-of-the-art survey presents some of the most recent work in the field. The papers presented together with an introduction are organized in topical sections on tabular data protection, microdata protection, and software and user case studies.