Maximum Utility-Minimum Information Loss Table Server Design for Statistical Disclosure Control of Tabular Data

Author(s):  
Ramesh A. Dandekar
Author(s):  
JORDI CASTRO

Minimum distance controlled tabular adjustment is a recent perturbative approach for statistical disclosure control in tabular data. Given a table to be protected, it looks for the closest safe table, using some particular distance. Controlled adjustment is known to provide high data utility. However, the disclosure risk has only been partially analyzed using theoretical results from optimization. This work extends these previous results, providing both a more detailed theoretical analysis, and an extensive empirical assessment of the disclosure risk of the method. A set of 25 instances from the literature and four different attacker scenarios are considered, with several random replications for each scenario, both for L1 and L2 distances. This amounts to the solution of more than 2000 optimization problems. The analysis of the results shows that the approach has low disclosure risk when the attacker has no good information on the bounds of the optimization problem. On the other hand, when the attacker has good estimates of the bounds, and the only uncertainty is in the objective function (which is a very strong assumption), the disclosure risk of controlled adjustment is high and it should be avoided.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (9) ◽  
pp. 7-27
Author(s):  
Andrzej Młodak

The most important methods of assessing information loss caused by statistical disclosure control (SDC) are presented in the paper. The aim of SDC is to protect an individual against identification or obtaining any sensitive information relating to them by anyone unauthorised. The application of methods based either on the concealment of specific data or on their perturbation results in information loss, which affects the quality of output data, including the distributions of variables, the forms of relationships between them, or any estimations. The aim of this paper is to perform a critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the particular types of methods of assessing information loss resulting from SDC. Moreover, some novel ideas on how to obtain effective and well-interpretable measures are proposed, including an innovative way of using a cyclometric function (arcus tangent) to determine the deviation of values from the original ones, as a result of SDC. Additionally, the inverse correlation matrix was applied in order to assess the influence of SDC on the strength of relationships between variables. The first presented method allows obtaining effective and well- -interpretable measures, while the other makes it possible to fully use the potential of the mutual relationships between variables (including the ones difficult to detect by means of classical statistical methods) for a better analysis of the consequences of SDC. Among other findings, the empirical verification of the utility of the suggested methods confirmed the superiority of the cyclometric function in measuring the distance between the curved deviations and the original data, and also heighlighted the need for a skilful correction of its flattening when large value arguments occur.


2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Neeraj Tiwari

The most common method of providing data to the public is through statistical tables. The problem of protecting confidentiality in statistical tables containing sensitive information has been of great concern during the recent years. Rounding methods are perturbation techniques widely used by statistical agencies for protecting the confidential data. Random rounding is one of these methods. In this paper, using the technique of random rounding and quadratic programming, we introduce a new methodology for protecting the confidential information of tabular data with minimum loss of information. The tables obtained through the proposed method consist of unbiasedly rounded values, are additive and have specified level of confidentiality protection. Some numerical examples are also discussed to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed procedure over the existing procedures.


2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 3256-3263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun-Lin Lin ◽  
Tsung-Hsien Wen ◽  
Jui-Chien Hsieh ◽  
Pei-Chann Chang

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (348) ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Michał Pietrzak

The aim of this article is to analyse the possibility of applying selected perturbative masking methods of Statistical Disclosure Control to microdata, i.e. unit‑level data from the Labour Force Survey. In the first step, the author assessed to what extent the confidentiality of information was protected in the original dataset. In the second step, after applying selected methods implemented in the sdcMicro package in the R programme, the impact of those methods on the disclosure risk, the loss of information and the quality of estimation of population quantities was assessed. The conclusion highlights some problematic aspects of the use of Statistical Disclosure Control methods which were observed during the conducted analysis.


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