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Oganian A, Iacob I, Lesaja G. Multivariate Top-Coding for Statistical Disclosure Limitation. Priv Stat Databases. 2020;12276:136-148doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-57521-2_10.
Oganian, A., Iacob, I., & Lesaja, G. (2020). Multivariate Top-Coding for Statistical Disclosure Limitation. Privacy in statistical databases. PSD (Conference : 2004-), 12276136-148. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57521-2_10
Oganian, Anna, et al. "Multivariate Top-Coding for Statistical Disclosure Limitation." Privacy in statistical databases. PSD (Conference : 2004-) vol. 12276 (2020): 136-148. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57521-2_10
Oganian A, Iacob I, Lesaja G. Multivariate Top-Coding for Statistical Disclosure Limitation. Priv Stat Databases. 2020 Sep;12276:136-148. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-57521-2_10. Epub 2020 Sep 16. PMID: 33889868; PMCID: PMC8057308.
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Priv Stat Databases. 2020 Sep;12276:136-148. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-57521-2_10. Epub 2020 Sep 16.

Multivariate Top-Coding for Statistical Disclosure Limitation.

Privacy in statistical databases. PSD (Conference : 2004-)

Anna Oganian, Ionut Iacob, Goran Lesaja

Affiliations

  1. National Center for Health Statistics, 3311 Toledo Rd, Hyattsville, MD, 20782, U.S.A.
  2. Georgia Southern University, Department of Mathematical Sciences, P.O. Box 8093, Statesboro, GA 30460, U.S.A.
  3. United States Naval Academy, Mathematics Department, 121 Blake Road, Annapolis, MD 21402, U.S.A.

PMID: 33889868 PMCID: PMC8057308 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-57521-2_10

Abstract

One of the most challenging problems for national statistical agencies is how to release to the public microdata sets with a large number of attributes while keeping the disclosure risk of sensitive information of data subjects under control. When statistical agencies alter microdata in order to limit the disclosure risk, they need to take into account relationships between the variables to produce a good quality public data set. Hence, Statistical Disclosure Limitation (SDL) methods should not be univariate (treating each variable independently of others), but preferably multivariate, that is, handling several variables at the same time. Statistical agencies are often concerned about disclosure risk associated with the extreme values of numerical variables. Thus, such observations are often top or bottom-coded in the public use files. Top-coding consists of the substitution of extreme observations of the numerical variable by a threshold, for example, by the 99th percentile of the corresponding variable. Bottom coding is defined similarly but applies to the values in the lower tail of the distribution. We argue that a univariate form of top/bottom-coding may not offer adequate protection for some subpopulations which are different in terms of a top-coded variable from other subpopulations or the whole population. In this paper, we propose a multivariate form of top-coding based on clustering the variables into groups according to some metric of closeness between the variables and then forming the rules for the multivariate top-codes using techniques of Association Rule Mining within the clusters of variables obtained on the previous step. Bottom-coding procedures can be defined in a similar way. We illustrate our method on a genuine multivariate data set of realistic size.

Keywords: Statistical disclosure limitation (SDL); association rule mining; dimensionality reduction; genetic algorithm; hierarchical clustering; top-coding

References

  1. MMWR Surveill Summ. 2008 Oct 31;57(11):1-20 - PubMed

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