Social networks have become an essential part of the people?s communication system. They allow the users to express and share all the things they like with all the people they are connected with. However, this shared information can be dangerous for their privacy issues. In addition, there is some information that is not explicitly given but is implicit in the text of the posts that the user sh...

Microaggregation is a special clustering problem where the goal is to cluster a set of points into groups of at least k points in such a way that groups are as homogeneous as possible. Microaggregation arises in connection with anonymization of statistical databases for privacy protection (k-anonymity), where points are assimilated to database records. A usual group homogeneity criterion is wit...

Japan’s new Statistics Act has come fully into effect in April 2009. The new law allows access to Anonymized microdata, and at the same time it requires users to go through an application process and imposes some restrictions. The National Statistics Center (NSTAC) has developed a type of microdata which can be accessed without an application process and used without restrictions. These data do...

In the last decade, a revolution has occurred in access to census microdata for social and behavioral research. More than 325 million person records (55 countries, 159 samples) representing two-thirds of the world's population are now readily available to bona fide researchers from the IPUMS-International website: www.ipums.org/international hosted by the Minnesota Population Center. Confidenti...

BACKGROUND Evaluating environmental health risks in communities requires models characterizing geographic and demographic patterns of exposure to multiple stressors. These exposure models can be constructed from multivariable regression analyses using individual-level predictors (microdata), but these microdata are not typically available with sufficient geographic resolution for community risk...

Generation of a synthetic microdata set that reproduces the statistical properties of an original microdata set is a promising approach to statistical disclosure control (SDC) of microdata. In this paper, a new method for generating continuous synthetic microdata is proposed. The covariance matrix and the univariate statistics of the original data set are exactly preserved. The method is non-it...

Statistical organizations collect data via survey forms and other methods. The microdata are valuable for modeling and analysis. To produce a public-use file, the organizations mask the data in a manner that may prevent re-identification of data associated with individual entities. The public-use microdata may allow one or two sets of analyses that approximately reproduce analyses that could be...

A breakthrough in the tradeoff between privacy and data quality has been achieved for restricted access to population census microdata samples. The IPUMS-International website, as of June 2006, offers integrated microdata for 47 censuses, totaling more than 140 million person records, with 13 countries represented. Over the next four years, the global collaboratory led by the Minnesota Populati...

Being promoted by major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Yandex, Microdata embedded in web pages, especially using schema.org, has become one of the most important markup languages for the Web. However, deployed Microdata is most often not free from errors, which limits its practical use. In this paper, we use the WebDataCommons corpus of Microdata extracted from more than 250 m...