IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2312.14191.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Noisy Measurements Are Important, the Design of Census Products Is Much More Important

Author

Listed:
  • John M. Abowd

Abstract

McCartan et al. (2023) call for "making differential privacy work for census data users." This commentary explains why the 2020 Census Noisy Measurement Files (NMFs) are not the best focus for that plea. The August 2021 letter from 62 prominent researchers asking for production of the direct output of the differential privacy system deployed for the 2020 Census signaled the engagement of the scholarly community in the design of decennial census data products. NMFs, the raw statistics produced by the 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System before any post-processing, are one component of that design-the query strategy output. The more important component is the query workload output-the statistics released to the public. Optimizing the query workload-the Redistricting Data (P.L. 94-171) Summary File, specifically-could allow the privacy-loss budget to be more effectively managed. There could be fewer noisy measurements, no post-processing bias, and direct estimates of the uncertainty from disclosure avoidance for each published statistic.

Suggested Citation

  • John M. Abowd, 2023. "Noisy Measurements Are Important, the Design of Census Products Is Much More Important," Papers 2312.14191, arXiv.org, revised May 2024.
  • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2312.14191
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.14191
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2312.14191. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.