Online Program

Protecting both Establishment and Company Level Contributions in Statistical Tables

Keywords: Magnitude Data Tables, Company Level Protection, Cell Suppression, EZS noise

We discuss protection of data that is used to generate magnitude data statistical tables, the type of table that is the most common data product from the economic census at the U.S. Census Bureau. We discuss two quite different protection methods, cell suppression and EZS multiplicative noise. We show how those methods can be used to protect contributions not only of the establishments for which Census receives data, but also all sums of such establishment contributions associated with the company to which they belong. The latter is sometimes referred to as ‘protection at the company level’. For example, we must protect the value associated with all establishments of a given company in all geographical regions, and, of course, the total value for all the establishments of the given company. This type of protection poses numerous challenges beyond those experienced with protection of only cell values. We will discuss some recent enhancements to the company level protection feature in our suppression software and compare it with how we are currently implementing company level protection with EZS noise.