A New Method for Protecting Interrelated Time Series with Bayesian Prior Distributions and Synthetic Data

Schneider, Matthew J., and John M. Abowd. A New Method for Protecting Interrelated Time Series with Bayesian Prior Distributions and Synthetic Data. Cornell University Preprint 1813:40828, 2014, available at http://hdl.handle.net/1813/40828.
A New Method for Protecting Interrelated Time Series with Bayesian Prior Distributions and Synthetic Data Schneider, Matthew J.; Abowd, John M. Organizations disseminate statistical summaries of administrative data via the Web for unrestricted public use. They balance the trade-off between confidentiality protection and inference quality. Recent developments in disclosure avoidance techniques include the incorporation of synthetic data, which capture the essential features of underlying data by releasing altered data generated from a posterior predictive distribution. The United States Census Bureau collects millions of interrelated time series micro-data that are hierarchical and contain many zeros and suppressions. Rule-based disclosure avoidance techniques often require the suppression of count data for small magnitudes and the modification of data based on a small number of entities. Motivated by this problem, we use zero-inflated extensions of Bayesian Generalized Linear Mixed Models (BGLMM) with privacy-preserving prior distributions to develop methods for protecting and releasing synthetic data from time series about thousands of small groups of entities without suppression based on the of magnitudes or number of entities. We find that as the prior distributions of the variance components in the BGLMM become more precise toward zero, confidentiality protection increases and inference quality deteriorates. We evaluate our methodology using a strict privacy measure, empirical differential privacy, and a newly defined risk measure, Probability of Range Identification (PoRI), which directly measures attribute disclosure risk. We illustrate our results with the U.S. Census Bureau’s Quarterly Workforce Indicators.