Statistical confidentiality: Optimization techniques to protect tables
Computers and Operations Research
A tool for analyzing and fixing infeasible RCTA instances
PSD'10 Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on Privacy in statistical databases
A heuristic block coordinate descent approach for controlled tabular adjustment
Computers and Operations Research
Automatic structure detection in constraints of tabular data
PSD'06 Proceedings of the 2006 CENEX-SDC project international conference on Privacy in Statistical Databases
A computational evaluation of optimization solvers for CTA
PSD'12 Proceedings of the 2012 international conference on Privacy in Statistical Databases
Information Sciences: an International Journal
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National statistical agencies (NSAs) routinely release large amounts of tabular information. Prior to dissemination, tabular data need to be processed to avoid disclosure of individual confidential information. Cell suppression is one of the most widely used techniques by NSAs. Optimal procedures for cell suppression are computationally expensive with large real-world data sets, so heuristic procedures are used. Most heuristics for positive tables (i.e., cell values are nonnegative) rely on the solution of minimum-cost network-flows subproblems. A very efficient heuristic based on shortest paths already exists, but it is only appropriate for general tables (i.e., cell values can be either positive or negative), whereas in practice most tables are positive. We present a method that sensibly combines and improves previous approaches, overcoming some of their drawbacks: it is designed for positive tables and requires only the solution of shortest-path subproblems---therefore being much more efficient than other network-flows heuristics. We report extensive computational experience in the solution of randomly generated and real-world instances, comparing the heuristic with alternative procedures. The results show that the method, currently included in a software package for statistical data protection, fits NSA needs: it is extremely efficient and provides good solutions.