Social and economic policies are inextricably linked with population health outcomes in Europe, yet few datasets are able to fully explore and compare this relationship across European countries. The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey aims to address this gap using microdata on income, living conditions and health. EU-SILC contains both cross-sectional an...

It is shown how one can effectively use microdata in modelling the change over time in an aggregate (e.g. mean consumption expenditure) of a large and heterogeneous population. The starting point of our aggregation analysis is a specification of explanatory variables on the micro-level. Typically, some of these explanatory variables are observable and others are unobservable. Based on certain h...

Article history: Received 20 April 2009 Received in revised form 25 February 2010 Accepted 10 April 2010

IPUMS-International disseminates more than two hundred integrated, confidentialized census microdata samples to thousands of researchers worldwide at no cost. The number of samples is increasing at the rate of several dozen per year, as the process of integrating metadata and microdata is completed. Protecting the statistical confidentiality and privacy of individuals represented in the microda...

To protect individuals in microdata from the risk of re-identification, a general perturbative method called PRAM (the Post-Randomization Method) is sometimes used for masking records. This method adds “noise” to categorical variables by changing values of categories for a small number of records according to a prescribed probability matrix and a stochastic process based on the outcome of a ran...

IPUMS-International disseminates population census microdata at no cost for 69 countries. Currently, a series of 212 samples totaling almost a half billion person records are available to researchers. Registration is required for researchers to gain access to the microdata. Statistics from Google Analytics show that IPUMS-International's lengthy, probing registration form is an effective deterr...

Privacy-maintaining data release is one of the most important challenges in an information system, because of the wide collection of sensitive information on the internet. A number of solutions have been designed for privacy-maintaining data release. This paper provides an inspection of the state-of-theart methods for privacy protection. The paper discusses novel and powerful privacy definition...

Publishing data for analysis from a microdata table containing sensitive attributes, while maintaining individual privacy, is a problem of increasing significance today. The k-anonymity model was proposed for privacy preserving data publication. While focusing on identity disclosure, k-anonymity model fails to protect attribute disclosure to some extent. Many efforts are made to enhance the kan...

This paper examines spatial variations in exposure to toxic air pollution from industrial facilities in urban areas of the United States, using geographic microdata from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk‐Screening Environmental Indicators project. We find that average exposure in an urban area is positively correlated with the extent of racial ...

Before sharing to support ad hoc aggregate analyses, microdata often need to be anonymized to protect the privacy of individuals. A variety of privacy models have been proposed for microdata anonymization. Many of these models (e.g., -closeness) essentially require that, after anonymization, groups of sensitive attribute values follow specified distributions. To support such models, in this pap...