Providing access to confidential research data through synthesis and verification: an application to data on employees of the U.S. federal government
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Publication:1624838
DOI10.1214/18-AOAS1194zbMATH Open1405.62236arXiv1705.07872WikidataQ129462601 ScholiaQ129462601MaRDI QIDQ1624838FDOQ1624838
Authors: Andrés F. Barrientos, Alexander Bolton, Tom Balmat, Jerome P. Reiter, John M. de Figueiredo, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Yan Chen, Charley Kneifel, Mark DeLong 
Publication date: 16 November 2018
Published in: The Annals of Applied Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)
Abstract: Data stewards seeking to provide access to large-scale social science data face a difficult challenge. They have to share data in ways that protect privacy and confidentiality, are informative for many analyses and purposes, and are relatively straightforward to use by data analysts. One approach suggested in the literature is that data stewards generate and release synthetic data, i.e., data simulated from statistical models, while also providing users access to a verification server that allows them to assess the quality of inferences from the synthetic data. We present an application of the synthetic data plus verification server approach to longitudinal data on employees of the U.S. federal government. As part of the application, we present a novel model for generating synthetic career trajectories, as well as strategies for generating high dimensional, longitudinal synthetic datasets. We also present novel verification algorithms for regression coefficients that satisfy differential privacy. We illustrate the integrated use of synthetic data plus verification via analysis of differentials in pay by race. The integrated system performs as intended, allowing users to explore the synthetic data for potential pay differentials and learn through verifications which findings in the synthetic data hold up and which do not. The analysis on the confidential data reveals pay differentials across races not documented in published studies.
Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.07872
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Cited In (5)
- 30 years of synthetic data
- Reproducibility and transparency versus privacy and confidentiality: reflections from a data editor
- A Feasibility Study of Differentially Private Summary Statistics and Regression Analyses with Evaluations on Administrative and Survey Data
- Comparative study of differentially private data synthesis methods
- Bayesian bootstraps for massive data
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