Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Disclosure risk assessment with Bayesian non-pa...

Electronic data

  • S&C disclosure

    Accepted author manuscript, 1.23 MB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Links

Text available via DOI:

View graph of relations

Disclosure risk assessment with Bayesian non-parametric hierarchical modelling

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

E-pub ahead of print
Article number158
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>31/10/2025
<mark>Journal</mark>Statistics and Computing
Issue number5
Volume35
Number of pages14
Publication StatusE-pub ahead of print
Early online date29/07/25
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Micro and survey datasets often contain private information about individuals, like their health status, income, or political preferences. Previous studies have shown that, even after data anonymization, a malicious intruder could still be able to identify individuals in the dataset by matching their variables to external information. Disclosure risk measures are statistical measures meant to quantify how big such a risk is for a specific dataset. One of the most common measures is the number of sample unique values that are also population unique. Mixed membership models can provide very accurate estimates of this measure. A limitation of this approach is that the number of extreme profiles has to be chosen by the modeller. In this article, we propose a non-parametric version of the model, based on the Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP). The proposed approach does not require any tuning parameter or model selection step and provides accurate estimates of the disclosure risk measure, even with samples as small as 1% of the population size. Moreover, a data augmentation scheme to address the presence of structural zeros is presented. The proposed methodology is tested on a real dataset from the New York microdata.