Anne-Sophie Charest

Université Laval | ULAVAL · Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Synthetic datasets generated within the multiple imputation frame-work are now commonly used by statistical agencies to protect the confidentiality of their respondents. More recently, researchers have also proposed techniques to generate synthetic datasets which offer the formal guarantee of differential privacy. While combining rules were derived...

In statistical disclosure control, the goal of data analysis is twofold: The released information must provide accurate and useful statistics about the underlying population of interest, while minimizing the potential for an individual record to be identified. In recent years, the notion of differential privacy has received much attention in theore...

Empirical differential privacy (EDP) has been proposed as an alternative to differential privacy (DP), with the important advantages that the procedure can be applied to any bayesian model and requires less technical work from the part of the user. While EDP has been shown to be easy to implement, little is known of its theoretical underpinnings. T...

In this paper, we evaluate empirically the quality of statistical inference from differentially-private synthetic contingency tables. We compare three methods: histogram perturbation, the Dirichlet-Multinomial synthesizer and the Hardt-Ligett-McSherry algorithm. We consider a goodness-of-fit test for models suitable to the real data, and a model se...

Differentially private (DP) synthetic datasets have been receiving significant attention from academia, industry, and government. However, little is known about how to perform statistical inference using DP synthetic datasets. Naive approaches that do not take into account the induced uncertainty due to the DP mechanism will result in biased estima...

This article is an introduction to the 13 articles in the JSSAM special issue on Privacy, Confidentiality, and Disclosure Protection. We also provide background information to place the articles into context.

We are concerned here with the publication of microdata which preserve the confidentiality of the respondents, as measured by differential privacy. We borrow the SIMEX methodology from the measurement error literature to analyze microdata perturbed with the Laplace mechanism, hoping to recover unbiased estimates of the parameters of interest. Our s...

Previous empirical studies on catastrophe (CAT) bond premiums rely mostly on actuarial models, and usually compare their accuracy in terms of in-sample fit and out-of-sample predictive power. After deriving a utility-based specification for pricing CAT bonds under Hyperbolic Absolute Risk Aversion (HARA), we propose two specification tests that use...

A number of international surveys – the Barometers, the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), the International Social Survey Program (ISSC), the World Values Survey (WVS) – include questions pertaining to trust in institutions. However, it is not obvious if and how we can combine these measures and if and how we can analyse them jointly....

La confiance est le ciment de la société et de la démocratie. Elle permet de se fier au fait que, dans des circonstances prévisibles, l’interaction que l’on aura avec une institution sera également prévisible. La confiance dans les institutions devrait donc, en moyenne, se maintenir dans le temps de façon à assurer le fonctionnement de la société....

During the recent decades, a number of countries started a transition towards democracy. As this transition was taking place, it became easier to conduct surveys. Concurrently, “Barometer” surveys developed in Asia (Asia Barometer), in Arab countries (Arab Barometer), in Africa (Afro Barometer) and in Latino America (Latino Barometro) and East Euro...

In statistical disclosure control, the goal of data analysis is twofold: The released information must provide accurate and useful statistics about the underlying population of interest, while minimizing the potential for an individual record to be identified. In recent years, the notion of differential privacy has received much attention in theore...

Previous empirical studies on catastrophe (CAT) bond premiums rely mostly on actuarial models, and usually compare their accuracy in terms of in-sample fit and out-of-sample predictive power. After deriving a utility-based specification for pricing CAT bonds under Hyperbolic Absolute Risk Aversion (HARA), we propose two specification tests that use...

When estimating model parameters from survey data, two sources of variability should normally be taken into account for inference purposes: the model that is assumed to have generated data of the finite population, and the sampling design. If the overall sampling fraction is negligible, the model variability can in principle be ignored and bootstra...

Whether the number of tropical cyclones (TCs) has increased in the last 150 years has become a matter of intense debate. We investigate the effects of beliefs about TC detection capacities in the North Atlantic on trends in TC numbers since the 1870s. While raw data show an increasing trend of TC counts, the capability to detect TCs and to determin...

We evaluated alternative approaches to imputation for univariate estimates and multivariate regression analyses of physiological health measures collected in the 2003-2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). From the NHANES public use data files we selected 5041 respondents age 20+ who provided questionnaire or medical exam d...

This paper presents the result of my summer research on Lenstra's algorithm for factoring with elliptic curves. It first describes Pollard's p-1 algorithm, which is in a way the basis for Lenstra's algorithm. The theory behind both algorithms will be discussed, as well as the their detailed steps, their implementation and their efficiency. This pap...