NOISE INFUSION AS A CONFIDENTIALITY PROTECTION MEASURE FOR GRAPH-BASED STATISTICS
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-30
Abstract
We use the bipartite graph representation of longitudinally linked em-ployer-employee data, and the associated projections onto the employer and em-ployee nodes, respectively, to characterize the set of potential statistical summar-ies that the trusted custodian might produce. We consider noise infusion as the primary confidentiality protection method. We show that a relatively straightfor-ward extension of the dynamic noise-infusion method used in the U.S. Census Bureau's Quarterly Workforce Indicators can be adapted to provide the same confidentiality guarantees for the graph-based statistics: all inputs have been modified by a minimum percentage deviation (i.e., no actual respondent data are used) and, as the number of entities contributing to a particular statistic increases, the accuracy of that statistic approaches the unprotected value. Our method also ensures that the protected statistics will be identical in all releases based on the same inputs.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
data,
statistical,
database,
quarterly,
statistical agencies,
disclosure,
agency,
confidentiality,
earnings,
employee,
privacy,
workforce,
percentile,
employee data
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
National Science Foundation,
Cornell University,
Unemployment Insurance,
Alfred P Sloan Foundation,
Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics,
Employment History File,
Employer Characteristics File,
Individual Characteristics File,
Quarterly Workforce Indicators,
Office of Personnel Management,
Probability Density Function
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'NOISE INFUSION AS A CONFIDENTIALITY PROTECTION MEASURE FOR GRAPH-BASED STATISTICS' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperHIRES, SEPARATIONS, AND THE JOB TENURE DISTRIBUTION IN ADMINISTRATIVE EARNINGS RECORDS
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-29
Statistics on hires, separations, and job tenure have historically been tabulated from survey data. In recent years, these statistics are increasingly being produced from administrative records. In this paper, we discuss the calculation of hires, separations, and job tenure from quarterly administrative records, and we present these labor market statistics calculated from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program. We pay special attention to a phenomenon that survey data is ill-suited to analyze: single quarter jobs, which we define as jobs in which the hire and separation occur in the same quarter. We explore the trends of hires, separations, tenure, and single quarter jobs in the United States for the years 1998-2010. We discuss issues associated with creating these statistics from quarterly earnings records, and we identify the challenges that remain.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperMixed-Effects Methods For Search and Matching Research
September 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-43
We study mixed-effects methods for estimating equations containing person and firm effects. In economics such models are usually estimated using fixed-effects methods. Recent enhancements to those fixed-effects methods include corrections to the bias in estimating the covariance matrix of the person and firm effects, which we also consider.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperConfidentiality Protection in the Census Bureau Quarterly Workforce Indicators
February 2006
Working Paper Number:
tp-2006-02
The QuarterlyWorkforce Indicators are new estimates developed by the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program as a part of its Local Employment Dynamics partnership with 37 state Labor Market Information offices. These data provide detailed quarterly statistics on employment, accessions, layoffs, hires, separations, full-quarter employment (and related flows), job creations, job destructions, and earnings (for flow and stock categories of workers). The data are released for NAICS industries (and 4-digit SICs) at the county, workforce investment board, and metropolitan area levels of geography. The confidential microdata - unemployment insurance wage records, ES-202 establishment employment, and Title 13 demographic and economic information - are protected using a permanent multiplicative noise distortion factor. This factor distorts all input sums, counts, differences and ratios. The released statistics are analytically valid - measures are unbiased and time series properties are preserved. The confidentiality protection is manifested in the release of some statistics that are flagged as "significantly distorted to preserve confidentiality." These statistics differ from the undistorted statistics by a significant proportion. Even for the significantly distorted statistics, the data remain analytically valid for time series properties. The released data can be aggregated; however, published aggregates are less distorted than custom postrelease aggregates. In addition to the multiplicative noise distortion, confidentiality protection is provided by the estimation process for the QWIs, which multiply imputes all missing data (including missing establishment, given UI account, in the UI wage record data) and dynamically re-weights the establishment data to provide state-level comparability with the BLS's Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDynamically Consistent Noise Infusion and Partially Synthetic Data as Confidentiality Protection Measures for Related Time Series
July 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-13
The Census Bureau's Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) provide detailed quarterly statistics on employment measures such as worker and job flows, tabulated by worker characteristics in various combinations. The data are released for several levels of NAICS industries and geography, the lowest aggregation of the latter being counties. Disclosure avoidance methods are required to protect the information about individuals and businesses that contribute to the underlying data. The QWI disclosure avoidance mechanism we describe here relies heavily on the use of noise infusion through a permanent multiplicative noise distortion factor, used for magnitudes, counts, differences and ratios. There is minimal suppression and no complementary suppressions. To our knowledge, the release in 2003 of the QWI was the first large-scale use of noise infusion in any official statistical product. We show that the released statistics are analytically valid along several critical dimensions { measures are unbiased and time series properties are preserved. We provide an analysis of the degree to which confidentiality is protected. Furthermore, we show how the judicious use of synthetic data, injected into the tabulation process, can completely eliminate suppressions, maintain analytical validity, and increase the protection of the underlying confidential data.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperJOB-TO-JOB (J2J) Flows: New Labor Market Statistics From Linked Employer-Employee Data
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-34
Flows of workers across jobs are a principal mechanism by which labor markets allocate workers to optimize productivity. While these job flows are both large and economically important, they represent a significant gap in available economic statistics. A soon to be released data product from the U.S. Census Bureau will fill this gap. The Job-to-Job (J2J) flow statistics provide estimates of worker flows across jobs, across different geographic labor markets, by worker and firm characteristics, including direct job-to-job flows as well as job changes with intervening nonemployment. In this paper, we describe the creation of the public-use data product on job-to-job flows. The data underlying the statistics are the matched employer-employee data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program. We describe definitional issues and the identification strategy for tracing worker movements between employers in administrative data. We then compare our data with related series and discuss similarities and differences. Lastly, we describe disclosure avoidance techniques for the public use file, and our methodology for estimating national statistics when there is partially missing geography.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDisclosure Limitation and Confidentiality Protection in Linked Data
January 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-07
Confidentiality protection for linked administrative data is a combination of access modalities and statistical disclosure limitation. We review traditional statistical disclosure limitation methods and newer methods based on synthetic data, input noise infusion and formal privacy. We discuss how these methods are integrated with access modalities by providing three detailed examples. The first example is the linkages in the Health and Retirement Study to Social Security Administration data. The second example is the linkage of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to administrative data from the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration. The third example is the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data, which links state unemployment insurance records for workers and firms to a wide variety of censuses and surveys at the U.S. Census Bureau. For examples, we discuss access modalities, disclosure limitation methods, the effectiveness of those methods, and the resulting analytical validity. The final sections discuss recent advances in access modalities for linked administrative data.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEstimation of Job-to-Job Flow Rates under Partially Missing Geography
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-29
Integration of data from different regions presents challenges for the calculation of entitylevel longitudinal statistics with a strong geographic component: for example, movements between employers, migration, business dynamics, and health statistics. In this paper, we consider the estimation of worker-level employment statistics when the geographies (in our application, US states) over which such measures are defined are partially missing. We focus on the recent pilot set of job-to-job flow statistics produced by the US Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer- Household Dynamics (LEHD) program, which measure the frequency of worker movements between jobs and into and out of nonemployment. LEHD's coverage of the labor force gradually increases during the 1990s and 2000s because some states have a longer time series than others, so employment transitions involving missing states are only partially or not at all observed. We propose and implement a method for estimating national-level job-to-job flow statistics that involves dropping observed states to recover the relationship between missing states and directly tabulated job-to-job flow rates. Using the estimated relationship between the observable characteristics of the missing states and changes in the employment measures, we provide estimates of the rates of job-to-job, and job-to-nonemployment, job-to-nonemploymentto- job flows were all states uniformly available.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperA New Measure of Multiple Jobholding in the U.S. Economy
September 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-26
We create a measure of multiple jobholding from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data. This new series shows that 7.8 percent of persons in the U.S. are multiple jobholders, this percentage is pro-cyclical, and has been trending upward during the past twenty years. The data also show that earnings from secondary jobs are, on average, 27.8 percent of a multiple jobholder's total quarterly earnings. Multiple jobholding occurs at all levels of earnings, with both higher- and lower-earnings multiple jobholders earning more than 25 percent of their total earnings from multiple jobs. These new statistics tell us that multiple jobholding is more important in the U.S. economy than we knew.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Creation of the Employment Dynamics Estimates
July 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-13
View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperTotal Error and Variability Measures with Integrated Disclosure Limitation for Quarterly Workforce Indicators and LEHD Origin Destination Employment Statistics in On The Map
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-71
We report results from the rst comprehensive total quality evaluation of five major indicators in the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI): total employment, beginning-of-quarter employment, full-quarter employment, total payroll, and average monthly earnings of full-quarter employees. Beginning-of-quarter employment is also the main tabulation variable in the LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) workplace reports as displayed in OnTheMap (OTM). The evaluation is conducted by generating multiple threads of the edit and imputation models used in the LEHD Infrastructure File System. These threads conform to the Rubin (1987) multiple imputation model, with each thread or implicate being the output of formal probability models that address coverage, edit, and imputation errors. Design-based sampling variability and nite population corrections are also included in the evaluation. We derive special formulas for the Rubin total variability and its components that are consistent with the disclosure avoidance system used for QWI and LODES/OTM workplace reports. These formulas allow us to publish the complete set of detailed total quality measures for QWI and LODES. The analysis reveals that the five publication variables under study are estimated very accurately for tabulations involving at least 10 jobs. Tabulations involving three to nine jobs have quality in the range generally deemed acceptable. Tabulations involving zero, one or two jobs, which are generally suppressed in the QWI and synthesized in LODES, have substantial total variability but their publication in LODES allows the formation of larger custom aggregations, which will in general have the accuracy estimated for tabulations in the QWI based on a similar number of workers.View Full Paper PDF
