Privacy, accuracy, and consistency too

TLDR

Contingency tables are central to official statistics, yet current disclosure‑control methods fail to satisfy privacy, accuracy, and consistency simultaneously. The authors aim to develop a method that simultaneously guarantees privacy, accuracy, and consistency for released contingency tables. They propose a solution that achieves strong guarantees for all three desiderata at once.

Abstract

The contingency table is a work horse of official statistics, the format of reported data for the US Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Internal Revenue Service. In many settings such as these privacy is not only ethically mandated, but frequently legally as well. Consequently there is an extensive and diverse literature dedicated to the problems of statistical disclosure control in contingency table release. However, all current techniques for reporting contingency tables fall short on at leas one of privacy, accuracy, and consistency (among multiple released tables). We propose a solution that provides strong guarantees for all three desiderata simultaneously.