Measures of Disclosure Risk for Functions of Totals

• Activity Number: 138
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 5, 2013 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Ann-Marie Flygare*+ and Helen Lindkvist
• Companies: Statistics Sweden and Statistics Sweden
• Keywords: confidentiality ; disclosure risk ; estimates of change

Abstract

National statistical institutes have for a long time been aware of the importance of preserving confidentiality of the information provided by respondents. Different rules to decide whether there are any disclosure risks for estimates of, for example, totals are already well developed and they are also widely used. However, there has not been much focus on possible disclosure risks when publishing estimates of functions of totals, such as changes over time. Estimates of changes are often of interest in business surveys and disclosure rules also have to be used for these estimates, to check for possible disclosure risks. This paper will discuss possible rules for estimating disclosure risks for estimates of changes over time. The performance of some rules are compared on the survey Business cycle statistics for industry, where one parameter of interest is change in industrial production volume.