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The Census Bureau has released revised versions of the most recent Privacy-Protected Microdata Files (PPMF) and accompanying Detailed Summary Metrics, correcting a defect in the system code that impacted results in the September 17 files. We anticipate that the IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) will produce and post a corresponding new set of demonstration data soon, and we’ll alert you when that’s published.
As discussed previously, the 2020-09-17 (and new 2020-11-16) PPMFs reflect system improvements in American Indian and Alaska Native data processing as well as overall post-processing algorithms. We look forward to your continued feedback on these latest updates and are grateful for the second-level quality check you bring to this development process.
Next Steps in Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS) Development
Later this month, the Census Bureau’s Data Stewardship Executive Policy committee (DSEP) will finalize the set of invariants for the 2020 DAS. Then, throughout the month of December, the DAS team will conduct an extensive series of experimental runs of the DAS to evaluate and tune the system. These experiments will examine how various allocations of the privacy-loss budget by geographic level and by query set would impact accuracy and fitness-for-use of the data. Following these experiments, we will release a new set of Detailed Summary Metrics to allow our data users to assess the improvements made through this empirical tuning of the system. In the interest of time, we will not be issuing another set of PPMFs for those experiments.
The DAS team will also run a series of full-scale, national runs of the DAS at a wide range of privacy-loss budgets. This is in anticipation of DSEP’s decision-making in early 2021 on the final privacy-loss budget to be used for the production of the redistricting (P.L. 94-171) data product as well as the amount to be reserved for future 2020 Census publications, including the Demographic and Housing Characteristics File.
Once DSEP has made these decisions, we will release a new “Production-Ready” set of PPMFs and Detailed Summary Metrics that reflect the final privacy-loss budget and exact parameter settings of the DAS as it will be used for the production of the 2020 Census redistricting data product. As soon as practical thereafter, the exact production code base will be released for the P.L. 94-171 data product. The Census Bureau will continue to assess resource availability to determine the exact release dates of these products and will keep you informed of our progress.
As always, the Census Bureau welcomes feedback from our data users to inform the design of the experiments we will be performing, as well as to assist DSEP in making their final decisions. Feedback can be submitted via email at 2020DAS@census.gov.
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Do you have specific questions you'd like us to answer in this newsletter, or topics you'd like discussed? Send us an email at 2020DAS@census.gov and let us know!
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