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Activity Number: 191
Type: Topic Contributed
Date/Time: Monday, July 30, 2007 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
Abstract - #309156
Title: Application of the Truncated Triangular and the Trapezoidal Distributions for Developing Multiplicative Noise
Author(s): Jay J. Kim*+
Companies: National Center for Health Statistics
Address: 3311 Toledo Road, Hyattsville, MD, 20782,
Keywords: truncated triangular distribution ; masking ; confidentiality ; trapezoidal distribution
Abstract:

It has been suggested that the truncated triangular distribution be used for masking microdata. The random variable which follows the truncated triangular distribution serves as a multiplicative noise factor. The natural candidate distribution is the one which is centered at 1, but truncated symmetrically around 1, because it is not desirable to use some values which are too close to 1 due to confidentiality concerns. Instead of truncating the middle section of the distribution, we can assign low probabilities for that part of the distribution. This procedure will render some variations of the trapezoidal distribution. A third approach would be to use the upside-down triangular distribution for the middle section of the distribution. In this paper, we will derive the probability density function for each of the three distributions and investigate their properties.


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