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Bayesian disclosure risk assessment: predicting small frequencies in contingency tables
Author(s) -
Forster Jonathan J.,
Webb Emily L.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
journal of the royal statistical society: series c (applied statistics)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.205
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9876
pISSN - 0035-9254
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9876.2007.00591.x
Subject(s) - contingency table , categorical variable , bayesian probability , identification (biology) , computer science , statistics , multivariate statistics , econometrics , data mining , posterior probability , contingency , posterior predictive distribution , bayesian inference , machine learning , mathematics , artificial intelligence , bayesian linear regression , linguistics , philosophy , botany , biology
Summary. We propose an approach for assessing the risk of individual identification in the release of categorical data. This requires the accurate calculation of predictive probabilities for those cells in a contingency table which have small sample frequencies, making the problem somewhat different from usual contingency table estimation, where interest is generally focused on regions of high probability. Our approach is Bayesian and provides posterior predictive probabilities of identification risk. By incorporating model uncertainty in our analysis, we can provide more realistic estimates of disclosure risk for individual cell counts than are provided by methods which ignore the multivariate structure of the data set.