Claire Bowen
University of Notre Dame
3:30 PM
154 Hurley Hall
Statistical Tests to Elect Partitions Sequentially (STEPS) and Its Application in Differentially Private Release and Analysis of Voter Registration Data
Voter data is important in political science research and applications such as improving youth voter turnout and predicting the presidential election outcome. This kind of data often contains sensitive information about the individuals in the data sets. One way of mitigating the privacy concern is removing identifiers in the “anonymized” data by linking it to other public data sets such as healthcare data or the Personal Genome Project Data. DIfferentially Private Data Synthesis (DIPS) techniques produce synthetic data or pseudo individual records at a preset level of privacy protection. Although DIPS provides a strong and robust privacy guarantee, statistical inferences drawn from the synthetic data can be poor due to the large amount of noise added to the data. We propose and apply a new approach called Statistical Tests to Elect Partitions Sequentially (STEPS) on voter data that allocates the privacy budget based on the statistical significance of the data’s variables. From the simulation study, SAFE preserves the variability and variable associations of the non-parametic DIPS approaches.
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