Controlled Rounding of Tabular Data

James P. Kelly, Bruce L. Golden, Arjang A. Assad and Edward K. Baker
Additional contact information
James P. Kelly: University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland
Bruce L. Golden: University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland
Arjang A. Assad: University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland
Edward K. Baker: University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida

Operations Research, 1990, vol. 38, issue 5, 760-772

Abstract: Controlled rounding is a procedure that perturbs tabular data collected from respondents in such a way as to preserve the anonymity of the respondents while maintaining the integrity of the data. The three-dimensional controlled rounding problem is NP-complete. This paper describes a binary tree search algorithm for solving three-dimensional problems based on linear programming techniques. Computational results obtained from tests with over 31,000 randomly generated tables and 292 real-life tables have shown that this algorithm can effectively find controlled roundings when they exist or determine that no solution exists. The computational results also demonstrate that the running time of the search algorithm can be cut in half by using a heuristic for initializing the simplex basis for the linear programming problems.

Keywords: programming; integer; algorithms; heuristics: LP guided search; programming; integer; applications: controlled rounding; statistics; censoring: data perturbation methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1990
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:oropre:v:38:y:1990:i:5:p:760-772

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