Applying Data Synthesis for Longitudinal Business Data across Three Countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Data on businesses collected by statistical agencies are challenging to protect.Many businesses have unique characteristics, and distributions of employment,sales, and profits are highly skewed. Attackers wishing to conduct identificationattacks often have access to much more information than for any individual. Asa consequence, most disclosure avoidance mechanisms fail to strike an accept-able balance between usefulness and confidentiality protection. Detailed aggregatestatistics by geography or detailed industry classes are rare, public-use microdataon businesses are virtually inexistant, and access to confidential microdata can beburdensome. Synthetic microdata have been proposed as a secure mechanism topublish microdata, as part of a broader discussion of how to provide broader accessto such datasets to researchers. In this article, we document an experiment to cre-ate analytically valid synthetic data, using the exact same model and methods previ-ously employed for the United States, for data from two different countries: Canada(Longitudinal Employment Analysis Program (LEAP)) and Germany (EstablishmentHistory Panel (BHP)). We assess utility and protection, and provide an assessmentof the feasibility of extending such an approach in a cost-effective way to other data.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.072 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".