Joint NSF-Census-IRS Workshop on synthetic data and confidentiality protection, July 2009 Washington, DC

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This workshop brings together university-based researchers, members of the national statistical community, and other interested user communities to discuss and critique newly created public-use micro-data files that are based on the concepts of synthetic data and partially synthetic data. Although these ideas are over a decade old, statistical agencies are only now beginning to use them as a part of their on-going statistical operations. Hence, it is important to incite the vital process of quality improvement that comes from the interaction of the user community with the data producers. In the past, the details of confidentiality protection have been withheld by the agencies in order to maximize the difficulty associated with an attack by an intruder on one of the products. The confidential nature of the details of the conventional protection methodologies left little room for iterative improvement by interaction with the user community. In contrast, synthetic data products are transparent, virtually all of the salient details of the process can be published. More important, exact procedures have already been developed for statistical inference based on synthetic data. Finally, interactive revision of the release product based on the assessments of the user community was anticipated as part of the confidentiality protections, and therefore does not compromise them.The workshop combines papers about these new synthetic data products with evaluations and discussions from the user community. The results are published in a special issue of the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality and disseminated widely on the World Wide Web in order to jump-start the process of teaching the user community how to analyze such data appropriately and teaching the data providers where their current methods need improvement.The workshop is proposed for one full day, July 31, 2009, in the headquarters of the Census Bureau in Washington, DC. The timing and location permit dovetailing with the 2009 Joint Statistical Meetings, which will be held August 2-6, 2009 in Washington, DC. The Center for Economic Studies of the Census Bureau, which runs the Research Data Center network, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which has participated in the creation of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) Synthetic Beta file, and the Chief Statistician at OMB are cosponsors and supporters.Broader Impacts. In short, it is a new world. The statistical agencies are more dependent than ever on the informed feedback they get from their user communities about the quality of the release data, and the agencies are now enabled to improve those products by improving the synthesizers upon which they are based. These points were emphasized in the project funded as NSF-ITR grant SES-0427889 in which the university-based partners in the Census Bureau?s Research Data Center network collaborated directly with the Census Bureau in producing and evaluating a variety of synthetic micro-data products. By demonstrating the process with real newly-created and release public-use products based on synthetic data methods, this workshop provides a concrete example of how the user community and the statistical agencies can effectively collaborate on the development of more useful confidentiality