Releasing Earnings Distributions using Differential Privacy

oleh: Andrew David Foote, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Kevin McKinney

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: Labor Dynamics Institute 2019-10-01

Deskripsi

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released data on earnings percentiles of graduates from post-secondary institutions. This paper describes and evaluates the disclosure avoidance system developed for these statistics. We propose a differentially private algorithm for releasing these data based on standard differentially private building blocks, by constructing a histogram of earnings and the application of the Laplace mechanism to recover a differentially-private CDF of earnings. We demonstrate that our algorithm can release earnings distributions with low error, and our algorithm out-performs prior work based on the concept of smooth sensitivity from Nissim et al. (2007).