PHSafe: Disclosure Avoidance for the 2020 Census Supplemental Demographic and Housing Characteristics File (S-DHC)

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01254v1
• Date: Fri, 02 May 2025 13:20:32 GMT
• Title: PHSafe: Disclosure Avoidance for the 2020 Census Supplemental Demographic and Housing Characteristics File (S-DHC)
• Authors: William Sexton, Skye Berghel, Bayard Carlson, Sam Haney, Luke Hartman, Michael Hay, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Gerome Miklau, Amritha Pai, Simran Rajpal, David Pujol, Ruchit Shrestha, Daniel Simmons-Marengo,
• Abstract summary: The article describes the PHSafe algorithm, which is based on adding noise drawn from a discrete Gaussian distribution to the statistics of interest.<n>We prove that the algorithm satisfies a well-studied variant of differential privacy, called zero-concentrated differential privacy.
• Score: 7.7544849165583525
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: This article describes the disclosure avoidance algorithm that the U.S. Census Bureau used to protect the 2020 Census Supplemental Demographic and Housing Characteristics File (S-DHC). The tabulations contain statistics of counts of U.S. persons living in certain types of households, including averages. The article describes the PHSafe algorithm, which is based on adding noise drawn from a discrete Gaussian distribution to the statistics of interest. We prove that the algorithm satisfies a well-studied variant of differential privacy, called zero-concentrated differential privacy. We then describe how the algorithm was implemented on Tumult Analytics and briefly outline the parameterization and tuning of the algorithm.

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