2022/04/19 by John M. Abowd, Abowd, John M., Robert Ashmead +25
Computer Science · Mathematics · #Applications (stat.AP) #Census and Population Estimation #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Econometrics (econ.EM) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Economics and business #Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.08986
openalex publication_date 2022/04/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The Census TopDown Algorithm (TDA) is a disclosure avoidance system using differential privacy for privacy-loss accounting. The algorithm ingests the final, edited version of the 2020 Census data and the final tabulation geographic definitions. The algorithm then creates noisy versions of key queries on the data, referred to as measurements, using zero-Concentrated Differential Privacy. Another key aspect of the TDA are invariants, statistics that the Census Bureau has determined, as matter of policy, to exclude from the privacy-loss accounting. The TDA post-processes the measurements together with the invariants to produce a Microdata Detail File (MDF) that contains one record for each person and one record for each housing unit enumerated in the 2020 Census. The MDF is passed to the 2020 Census tabulation system to produce the 2020 Census Redistricting Data (P.L. 94-171) Summary File. This paper describes the mathematics and testing of the TDA for this purpose.