DG Update: March, 2001

National Institute of Statistical Sciences

Digital Government:

Project Update - March, 2001

1. RESEARCH. The central priority at NISS remains construction of a prototype table server. At this point, functioning, scalable code exists to manipulate tables, to calculate marginal subtables and to perform IPF reconstruction of the entire underlying table from arbitrary sets of released marginals. The next steps are to create a command line user interface (to accept and process queries for marginal tables) and the query history database.

2. NEW NISS POSTDOC. Adrian Dobra, who will complete his Ph.D. in statistics at Carnegie Mellon this summer, will join NISS as a postdoc in September, 2001. Adrian will be working on project, continuing his work as a graduate student, under Stephen Fienberg's supervision, to develop scalable methods to calculate bounds on table entries (as well as on new research at NISS on data quality).

3. PRESENTATIONS

March 12, 2001, at the Departmento Estadistica, Fac. Matematicas, Universidad de Valencia:
- Stephen Fienberg: "Statistical Aspects of Disclosure Limitation and Confidentiality: Links to Modern Statistical Methodology"
March 16, 2001, at the 2nd Joint ECE/Eurostat Work Session on Statistical Data Confidentiality (Skopje, Macedonia)
- Adrian Dobra and Stephen E. Fienberg: "Bounds for Cell Entries in Contingency Tables Induced by Fixed Marginals Mario Trottini: "A Decision-Theoretic Approach to Data Disclosure Problems"
- Mario Trottini: "A Decision-Theoretic Approach to Data Disclosure
  Problems"
March 28, 2001, at the ENAR/IMS Regional Meeting (Charlotte, NC):: Ashish Sanil: "Using Geographical Aggregation to Achieve Disclosability of Survey Data"

Upcoming presentations include the April 18-19 workshop (DC), dg.o 2001 (Los Angeles, May), the ASA Spring Research Conference (Roanoke, June) and the ISI (Seoul, August).

4. TECHNICAL REPORTS

G. T. Duncan, S. E. Fienberg, R. Krishnan, R. Padman and S. F. Roehrig (2001). "Disclosure limitation methods and information loss for tabular data." In J. Lane, ed., Confidentiality, Disclosure and Data Access: Theory and Practical Applications for Statistical Agencies. Elsevier (to appear).
Keller-McNulty, S., and Duncan, G. T. (2001). A Progress Report to the National Center for Education Statistics "Disclosure-Limited Statistical Analysis of Confidential Data To Support NSF-Sponsored Digital Government Grant." Los Alamos National Laboratory Technical Report LA-UR-01-1673

Reminder: all project technical reports are (eventually) available for download at www.niss.org/dg/technicalreports.html.

5. NISS AFFILIATES ACTIVITIES. At the March 2, 2001, planning meeting, the NISS affiliates program identified confidentiality (not only as a concern of Federal agency affiliates but also as an emerging one of many corporations, in such contexts as medical records and post-marketing surveillance for drugs) as one of four foci for the program over the next year.

Reflecting human resource concerns, a possible NISS training component was
outlined, which might encompass postdoctoral or dissertation fellowships that
accommodate significant learning curves; funding from such sources as NSF
grants, add-ons to agency contracts and the private sector (medical and
pharmaceutical); and topics such as public use microdata (from either
government or private sources) and nominally aggregated analyses.A workshop on "Data Confidentiality in the Internet Age" is in the initial
planning stage; early fall of this year is the intended date. Anyone (NISS
affiliates or not) who wishes to be involved should please notify me.6. OTHER ITEMS. Nobuaki Hoshino from the Faculty of Economics, Kanazawa
University, Ishikawa, Japan, will be a visiting fellow in the Center for
Automated Learning and Discovery at CMU from April 1, 2001 to March 31, 2002,
working on problems of disclosure limitation with Stephen Fienberg and other
CMU members of the NISS DG team. He is supported by a fellowship from the
Japanese government.

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