Disclosure risk assessment with Bayesian non-parametric hierarchical modelling

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Battiston, Marco, Rimella, Lorenzo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929471141969920
author Battiston, Marco
Rimella, Lorenzo
author_facet Battiston, Marco
Rimella, Lorenzo
contents Micro and survey datasets often contain private information about individuals, like their health status, income or political preferences. Previous studies have shown that, even after data anonymization, a malicious intruder could still be able to identify individuals in the dataset by matching their variables to external information. Disclosure risk measures are statistical measures meant to quantify how big such a risk is for a specific dataset. One of the most common measures is the number of sample unique values that are also population-unique. \cite{Man12} have shown how mixed membership models can provide very accurate estimates of this measure. A limitation of that approach is that the number of extreme profiles has to be chosen by the modeller. In this article, we propose a non-parametric version of the model, based on the Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP). The proposed approach does not require any tuning parameter or model selection step and provides accurate estimates of the disclosure risk measure, even with samples as small as 1$\%$ of the population size. Moreover, a data augmentation scheme to address the presence of structural zeros is presented. The proposed methodology is tested on a real dataset from the New York census.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_12521
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Disclosure risk assessment with Bayesian non-parametric hierarchical modelling
Battiston, Marco
Rimella, Lorenzo
Applications
Computation
Micro and survey datasets often contain private information about individuals, like their health status, income or political preferences. Previous studies have shown that, even after data anonymization, a malicious intruder could still be able to identify individuals in the dataset by matching their variables to external information. Disclosure risk measures are statistical measures meant to quantify how big such a risk is for a specific dataset. One of the most common measures is the number of sample unique values that are also population-unique. \cite{Man12} have shown how mixed membership models can provide very accurate estimates of this measure. A limitation of that approach is that the number of extreme profiles has to be chosen by the modeller. In this article, we propose a non-parametric version of the model, based on the Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP). The proposed approach does not require any tuning parameter or model selection step and provides accurate estimates of the disclosure risk measure, even with samples as small as 1$\%$ of the population size. Moreover, a data augmentation scheme to address the presence of structural zeros is presented. The proposed methodology is tested on a real dataset from the New York census.
title Disclosure risk assessment with Bayesian non-parametric hierarchical modelling
topic Applications
Computation
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12521