The Census Bureau has created demonstration tables to illustrate how the new differential privacy methodology for disclosure avoidance can be applied to produce CBP estimates.  The tables show estimates of the number of establishments, number of employees, first-quarter payroll, and annual payroll across geographic, industry, legal form of organization, and employment size levels.  The input data for the demonstration tables are a set of synthetic microdata created solely from previously published CBP results.  This approach ensures that existing disclosure avoidance safeguards are not compromised by the publication of the demonstration tables.  The demonstration tables also include summary statistics of the uncertainty introduced by the new differential privacy methodology and comparison with the uncertainty introduced by the current disclosure avoidance methodology.  

There are two types of tables: Basic and Research.

Basic Tables include:

• Text descriptions
• More quality measures: standard deviation and coefficient of variation
  • Note: Estimated quality measures are due to second stage noise.  For more information on second stage noise, please view the webinar.
• Rounded values
• Suppressions on negative values and values with a coefficient of variation greater than or equal to 100

Research Tables include:

• No suppressions
• Variance only
• No rounding
• No text descriptions
  • See the metadata tables for text descriptions

We invite comments on these demonstration tables, including use cases (examples of how CBP data are used) and whether the new methodology affects these use cases (including whether the amount of noise shown in the demonstration tables would prevent or change any analyses for those use cases). 

Contact Information: Margaret Beckom, Dissemination Standards Branch, Economic Management Division

Email: [email protected] with the subject CBP Disclosure Feedback

Phone: 301-763-7522