Applying Cell Suppression to Inter-Related Tables
Jacob Bournazian, Michael Salpeter, Bin Zhang · 2011
Cell suppression is the most common disclosure limitation method that the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) applies to the aggregate statistics that it publicly releases. Complementary cell suppression involves withholding the publication of nonsensitive cells in a table in order to protect the cells that were identified as sensitive to revealing company level information. If several tables within the same information product are related due to a multi-dimensional table design, then the selection of complementary cells in each table becomes a more complicated computational problem. EIA has two different automated suppression programs that it applies to tabular data. Each program follows a different methodology. The data protection levels for a table vary as a result of applying different complementary cell suppression methodologies. This paper focuses on the situation when tables are related and compares two different automated approaches for applying cell suppression methodology.