Releasing Earnings Distributions using Differential Privacy Disclosure Avoidance System For Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO)
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Abstract
The U.S. Census Bureau recently released data on earnings percentiles of graduates from post-secondary institutions. This paper describes and evaluates the disclosure avoidance system developed for these statistics. We propose a differentially private algorithm for releasing these data based on standard differentially private building blocks, by constructing a histogram of earnings and the application of the Laplace mechanism to recover a differentially-private CDF of earnings. We demonstrate that our algorithm can release earnings distributions with low error, and our algorithm out-performs prior work based on the concept of smooth sensitivity from Nissim et al. (2007).
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