Sponsor
Open access funding provided by Charles Darwin University.
Published In
Population Research and Policy Review
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-2022
Subjects
Age Diversity -- Census -- United States
Abstract
The age distribution of a population is important for understanding the demand and provision of labor and services, and as a denominator for calculating key agespecific rates such as fertility and mortality. In the US, the most important source of information on age distributions is the decennial census, but a new disclosure avoidance system (DAS) based on differential privacy will inject noise into the data, potentially compromising its utility for small areas and minority populations. In this paper, we explore the question whether there are statistical methods that can be applied to noisy age distributions to enhance the research uses of census data without compromising privacy. We apply a non-parametric method for smoothing with naive or informative priors to age distributions from the 2010 Census via demonstration data which have had the US Census Bureau’s implementation of differential privacy applied. We find that smoothing age distributions can increase the fidelity of the demonstration data to previously published population counts by age. We discuss implications for uses of data from the 2020 US Census and potential consequences for the measurement of population dynamics, health, and disparities.
Rights
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creat iveco mmons. org/ licen ses/ by/4. 0/.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1007/s11113-022-09734-2
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/38774
Citation Details
Dyrting, S., Flaxman, A., & Sharygin, E. (2022). Reconstruction of age distributions from differentially private census data. Population Research and Policy Review, 1-19.