Conference Paper: 'Spatial SDC experiments and evaluations with multiple countries comparison'

A conference paper I co-authored (together with Johannes Gussenbauer, Julien Jamme, Edwin de Jonge, and Peter-Paul de Wolf) titled 'Spatial SDC experiments and evaluations with multiple countries comparison' is available online. The paper was prepared for the 2023 UNECE Expert Meeting on Statistical Data Confidentiality and presented in the session Challenges in publishing safe tables and maps.

Quoting the abstract:

"This study utilizes a standardized 'census-like' dataset that is structured uniformly across all participating countries to assess disclosure risk based on grid data. We begin by evaluating and comparing the risk using this approach. Next, we apply spatial SDC methods from the R package sdcSpatial, including kernel density smoothing and quad tree aggregation. We re-evaluate the disclosure risk using these methods and analyze the resulting utility loss. Our analysis will be conducted across multiple countries, allowing for a comprehensive comparison of the utility loss between them." (Gussenbauer et al., 2023, p.1, emphasis added)

Highlights

  • A cross-country study of disclosure protection in small-scale population grids, using 16 geographic focus areas from Austria, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.
  • Documenting an application of the sdcSpatial R package to real-world data from official statistics in the context of population and housing censuses.
  • Probing the Kantorovich-Wasserstein distance, a.k.a. Earth mover's distance (EMD), for its potential to measure induced perturbation in large regular grids, using a new fast implementation algorithm from the R package SpatialKWD.

Additional information

The paper originated from work done as part of the European Statistical System's (ESS) Centre of Excellence on Statistical Disclosure Control, which is part of the Collaboration in Research and Methodology for Official Statistics (CROS) initiative, headed by Eurostat. The work was co-funded by the European Commision via a grant agreement (no. 899218, 2019-BG-Methodology).

Presentation slides from the conference are also available online. Supplementary R code for implementing experiments in the style of the paper can be found on GitHub.

Literature

J. Gussenbauer, J. Jamme, E. de Jonge, P.-P. de Wolf, M. Möhler, "Spatial SDC experiments and evaluations with multiple countries comparison," UNECE Expert Meeting on Statistical Data Confidentiality, Sept. 26-28, Wiesbaden, Germany, 2023.

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