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Selective Multiple Imputation Of Keys For Statistical Disclosure Control In Microdata, Rod Little, Fang Liu

The University of Michigan Department of Biostatistics Working Paper Series

The fundamental tension in statistical disclosure control (SDC) of microdata is the trade-off between the protection of individual respondents and the release of enough information for statistical inferences. We consider microdata that include key variables that contain identifying information and target variables that include sensitive information. Releasing the original data may expose some individuals in the sample to high risk of disclosure; deleting key variables is a common approach, but this loses information for some statistical analysis. This paper proposes selective multiple imputation of key variables (SMIKe) as an alternative SDC technique between those two extremes, and applies SMIKe to …