census bureau
A Sieve-Accelerated Quadrature Method for Exact Privacy Accounting in the 2020 U.S. Decennial Census
Su, Buxin, Su, Weijie, Wang, Chendi
In 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau adopted differential privacy for the Decennial Census by injecting integer-valued Gaussian noise into published census tabulations. Exactly evaluating the privacy guarantees of these data releases would enable the Bureau to determine the absolute minimum noise required to satisfy a given privacy budget, preventing the injection of unnecessary excess noise and thereby substantially enhancing the statistical utility of the data for downstream applications such as federal funding allocation and political redistricting. In this paper, we introduce a computationally efficient and mathematically rigorous quadrature method to evaluate the exact privacy profile of practical, large-scale census releases under the composition of heterogeneous discrete Gaussian mechanisms. Mathematically, this problem reduces to evaluating the tail probabilities of high-dimensional convolutions of integer-valued random variables sampled from heterogeneous discrete Gaussian distributions under exceptionally stringent numerical error tolerances (e.g., $10^{-35}$). By recasting the exact privacy accounting as a numerical integration problem via the discrete Fourier transform, we explicitly exploit the exponential convergence of the trapezoidal rule for complex analytic, periodic characteristic functions. Furthermore, to overcome the computational bottleneck of evaluating highly oscillatory integrands in high dimensions, we develop a sieve algorithm that identifies and prunes negligible quadrature nodes, accelerating the computation by three orders of magnitude. Taken together, these numerical innovations enable the first exact, assumption-free privacy accounting for the 2020 Census Demographic and Housing Characteristics File, achieving a 1,824-fold speedup over prior methods while maintaining census-mandated error tolerances.
Assessing the informative value of macroeconomic indicators for public health forecasting
Chakraborty, Shome, Khan, Fardil, Ghosal, Soutik
Macroeconomic conditions influence the environments in which health systems operate, yet their value as leading signals of health system capacity has not been systematically evaluated. In this study, we examine whether selected macroeconomic indicators contain predictive information for several capacity-related public health targets, including employment in the health and social assistance workforce, new business applications in the sector, and health care construction spending. Using monthly U.S. time series data, we evaluate multiple forecasting approaches, including neural network models with different optimization strategies, generalized additive models, random forests, and time series models with exogenous macroeconomic indicators, under alternative model fitting designs. Across evaluation settings, we find that macroeconomic indicators provide a consistent and reproducible predictive signal for some public health targets, particularly workforce and infrastructure measures, while other targets exhibit weaker or less stable predictability. Models emphasizing stability and implicit regularization tend to perform more reliably during periods of economic volatility. These findings suggest that macroeconomic indicators may serve as useful upstream signals for digital public health monitoring, while underscoring the need for careful model selection and validation when translating economic trends into health system forecasting tools.
The Republican Plan to Reform the Census Could Put Everyone's Privacy at Risk
The Republican Plan to Reform the Census Could Put Everyone's Privacy at Risk A little-known algorithmic process called "differential privacy" helps keep census data anonymous. President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have spent the better part of the president's second term radically reshaping the federal government. But in recent weeks, the GOP has set its sights on taking another run at an old target: the US census. Since the first Trump administration, the right has sought to add a question to the census that captures a respondent's immigration status and to exclude noncitizens from the tallies that determine how seats in Congress are distributed. In 2019, the Supreme Court struck down an attempt by the first Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the census. But now, a little-known algorithmic process called "differential privacy," created to keep census data from being used to identify individual respondents, has become the right's latest focus.
DeSIA: Attribute Inference Attacks Against Limited Fixed Aggregate Statistics
Mao, Yifeng, Stevanoski, Bozhidar, de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre
Empirical inference attacks are a popular approach for evaluating the privacy risk of data release mechanisms in practice. While an active attack literature exists to evaluate machine learning models or synthetic data release, we currently lack comparable methods for fixed aggregate statistics, in particular when only a limited number of statistics are released. We here propose an inference attack framework against fixed aggregate statistics and an attribute inference attack called DeSIA. We instantiate DeSIA against the U.S. Census PPMF dataset and show it to strongly outperform reconstruction-based attacks. In particular, we show DeSIA to be highly effective at identifying vulnerable users, achieving a true positive rate of 0.14 at a false positive rate of $10^{-3}$. We then show DeSIA to perform well against users whose attributes cannot be verified and when varying the number of aggregate statistics and level of noise addition. We also perform an extensive ablation study of DeSIA and show how DeSIA can be successfully adapted to the membership inference task. Overall, our results show that aggregation alone is not sufficient to protect privacy, even when a relatively small number of aggregates are being released, and emphasize the need for formal privacy mechanisms and testing before aggregate statistics are released.
Toward Equitable Access: Leveraging Crowdsourced Reviews to Investigate Public Perceptions of Health Resource Accessibility
Xue, Zhaoqian, Liu, Guanhong, Wei, Kai, Zhang, Chong, Zeng, Qingcheng, Hu, Songhua, Hua, Wenyue, Fan, Lizhou, Zhang, Yongfeng, Li, Lingyao
Access to health resources is a critical determinant of public well-being and societal resilience, particularly during public health crises when demand for medical services and preventive care surges. However, disparities in accessibility persist across demographic and geographic groups, raising concerns about equity. Traditional survey methods often fall short due to limitations in coverage, cost, and timeliness. This study leverages crowdsourced data from Google Maps reviews, applying advanced natural language processing techniques, specifically ModernBERT, to extract insights on public perceptions of health resource accessibility in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, we employ Partial Least Squares regression to examine the relationship between accessibility perceptions and key socioeconomic and demographic factors including political affiliation, racial composition, and educational attainment. Our findings reveal that public perceptions of health resource accessibility varied significantly across the U.S., with disparities peaking during the pandemic and slightly easing post-crisis. Political affiliation, racial demographics, and education levels emerged as key factors shaping these perceptions. These findings underscore the need for targeted interventions and policy measures to address inequities, fostering a more inclusive healthcare infrastructure that can better withstand future public health challenges.