Flaxman and Sharygin Publish On Reconstructing Age Distributions From Census Data with Differential Privacy Controls
Posted: 10/28/2022 (CSDE Research)
CSDE Affiliate Abraham Flaxman and CSDE External Affiliate Ethan Sharygin co-authored a study in the journal of Population Research and Policy Review entitled “Reconstruction of age distributions from differentially private census data”. The authors explore the question of whether there are statistical methods that can be applied to noisy age distributions to enhance the research uses of census data without compromising privacy. They utilize a non-parametric method for smoothing and find that smoothing age distributions can increase the fidelity of the demonstration data to previously published population counts by age and discuss implications for future research.