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Simulating identification by zip code, sex, and birthdate
11–20 of 39 posts
Re: Simulating identification by zip code, sex, and birthdate
#12I like when they go into the simulation/computational solutions before showing the analytical solution. Even much harder problems have very simple computational solutions/simulation "solutions"
Re: Simulating identification by zip code, sex, and birthdate
#13surprised that gender is that useful for this
I think it's just about anonymity in research data. These are the most common variables across databasets.
More and more data is being released, specially government funded data in the US. Anonimity of respondents is a big deal. Would you like everyone to know your debt? Or your salary?
If people knew that they will be identified and their answers will be public, they may lie or refuse to participate.
As a researcher you want truthful data about a representative sample of everyone. If you exclude people sensitive to privacy, that is not represetative.
There is a trade off between respondent anonymity, usefulness of data and complexity. Take for instance the "Survey of Consumer Finances" released by the Federal Reserve. It provides quite many variables, which is useful but uses multiply imputed observations to provide anonimity. However, it's a pain in the ass to deal with multiply imputed data :(
Re: Simulating identification by zip code, sex, and birthdate
#14This could probably be extrapolated to the entire western world...
Re: Simulating identification by zip code, sex, and birthdate
#15I like when they go into the simulation/computational solutions before showing the analytical solution. Even much harder problems have very simple computational solutions/simulation "solutions"
especially when the analytical solution is so hard to write that it requires approximations. I always wondered why we spend so much time learning analytical analysis when, once faced with real problems, we have to shortcut it in various, empirical approximations...
Re: Simulating identification by zip code, sex, and birthdate
#16While this is intended as just a proof of concept, I think this technique is mathematically flawed. You can't just use the average number of people in each zipcode, because if there is great variation in the number of people per zipcode, a randomly sampled person is more likely to be in a "large" zipcode than a small one.
Consider the case where we have 100000 people, and 10 zipcodes, each with an average of 10000 people. Now add that zipcodes 0-8 have only one person, and zipcode 9 has the remaining 99991 people. What percentage of Americans can be reliably identified by sex, zipcode, and full birthdate?
I don't know the exact answer, but I'm pretty sure it's closer to .01% than 87%. The 9 people in the 9 small districts are reliably identifiable, and 99.99% of the population in the large 10th district are essentially not identifiable. While the actual population distribution by zipcode is surely not this extreme, I think this example shows that the question cannot be answered unless a specific population distribution is known (or assumed).
Actual distribution of population can be seen here: http://proximityone.com/zip-place.htm (click on Population twice to sort by most populous). At a glance, there are quite a few zipcodes with far more than 10,000 people, making me think this is going to skew the results considerably.
Re: Simulating identification by zip code, sex, and birthdate
#17What is the identification for, to keep track of individuals over time? It will also fail for everybody who moves address and changes zip code.
Re: Simulating identification by zip code, sex, and birthdate
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you happen to be born on Jan. 1 a random number of years ago too?
1970 -- The Unix Epoch, of course! I imagine a lot of us here use that one.
No me, because that would be identifying myself as a relatively privacy conscious nerdy type. Combine that info with one or two other datapoints, and I'm sure it could be used to identify someone.
Re: Simulating identification by zip code, sex, and birthdate
#19surprised that gender is that useful for this
I think it's just about anonymity in research data. These are the most common variables across databasets. More and more data is being released, specially government funded data in the US. Anonimity of respondents is a big deal. Would you like everyone to know your debt? Or your salary? If people knew that they will be identified and their answers will be public, they may lie or refuse to participate. As a researcher…
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Re: Simulating identification by zip code, sex, and birthdate
#20I editorialized the title a bit - the author's title is "Simulating identification by zip code, sex and birthdate." Instead I've used the salient conclusion of the article, which is pretty interesting. This article is a footnote to another front page submission by the same author, "No funding for uncomfortable results." While that article is sobering, I find this one to be technically cooler. The author uses a simple…
I think that your alteration of the title is good, but why did you change "sex" to "gender"?! The study appears to be about sex as a matter of public record, so you've added inaccuracy, or at least ambiguity, to the title.
Oh good point. I don't know, I was writing from memory. I didn't mean any offense by it and didn't think about the implied difference between the two terms. Sorry!