Differential Privacy Unveiled – the Case of the 2020 Census for Redistricting and Data Privacy
Census statistics play a pivotal role in making public policy decisions such as redrawing legislative districts and allocating federal funds as well as supporting social science research. However, given the risk of revealing individual information, many statistical agencies are considering disclosure control methods based on differential privacy, by adding noise to tabulated data and subsequently conducting postprocessing. The U.S. Census Bureau in particular has implemented a Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS) based on differential privacy technology to protect individual Census responses. This system adds random noise, guided by a privacy loss budget (denoted by ϵ), to Census tabulations, aiming to prevent the disclosure of personal information as mandated by law. The privacy loss budget value ϵ determines the level of privacy protection, with higher ϵ values allowing more noise. While the adoption of differential privacy has been controversial, this approach is crucial for maintaining data confidentiality. Other countries and organizations are also considering this technology as well.
Assurance, a Bayesian Approach in Reliability Demonstration Testing for Quality Technology
Title: Assurance for Sample Size Determination in Reliability Demonstration Testing Authors & Year: Kevin Wilson & Malcolm Farrow (2021) Journal: Technometrics [DOI: 10.1080/00401706.2020.1867646] Why Reliability Demonstration Testing? Ensuring high reliability is critical for hardware products, especially those involved in safety-critical functions such as railway systems and nuclear power reactors. To build trust, manufacturers use reliability demonstration tests (RDT) where a sample of products is tested and failures are observed. If the test meets specific criteria, it demonstrates the product’s reliability. The RDT design varies based on the type of hardware product being tested, whether it is failure on demand or time to failure. Traditionally, sample sizes for RDT have been determined using methods that consider the power of a hypothesis test or risk criteria. Various approaches, such as Bayesian methods and risk criteria evaluation, have been developed over the decades in order to enhance the effectiveness of RDT. These measures…
An Introduction to Second-Generation p-Values
For centuries, the test of hypotheses has been one of the fundamental inferential concepts in statistics to guide the scientific community and to confirm one’s belief. The p-value has been a famous and universal metric to reject (or not to reject) a null hypothesis H0, which essentially denotes a common belief even without the experimental data.
New Methods for Calculating Confidence Intervals
For statistical modeling and analyses, construction of a confidence interval for a parameter of interest is an important inferential task to quantify the uncertainty around the parameter estimate. For instance, the true average lifetime of a cell phone can be a parameter of interest, which is unknown to both manufacturers and consumers. Its confidence interval can guide the manufacturers to determine an appropriate warranty period as well as to communicate the device reliability and quality to consumers. Unfortunately, exact methods to build confidence intervals are often unavailable in practice and approximate procedures are employed instead.
Predicting the Future (events)
For quality assessments in reliability and industrial engineering, it is often necessary to predict the number of future events (e.g., system or component failures). Examples include the prediction of warranty returns and the prediction of future product failures that could lead to serious property damages and/or human casualties. Business decisions such as a product recall are based on such predictions.