knitr::opts_chunk$set( collapse = TRUE, comment = "#>", out.width = "100%" ) # preloading library(sdcSpatial)
Plotting data on a map is a popular and helpful tool to analyze spatial data.
R makes it easy to plot spatial data with packages such as ggplot2
,
tmap
, mapview
or leaflet
.
However when plotting the spatial distribution of a
sensitive variable, e.g. income or unemployment,
you may accidentally reveal a sensitive value of an
individual observation.
Statistical disclosure control (SDC) deals with problems related to privacy in connection with
publishing statistics. SDC provides measures to assess disclosure risk and methods to
reduce disclosure risk in publications while trying to minimize information loss.
Several open source tools are available; see sdcTools for a collection of them. Commonly used tools include the standalone software tools $\mu$-argus and $\tau$-argus as well as the R-packages sdcTable and sdcMicro.
Traditionally, SDC software operates on values of (aggregated) records, where it does not directly make use of spatial characteristics that might be present in the data.
sdcSpatial
contains functions to create spatial distribution maps,
assess the risk of disclosure in locations on the map and to suppress
or adjust locations with revealing sensitive values.
library(sdcSpatial)
sdcSpatial
contains two simulated datasets with realistic locations:
dwellings
and enterprises
.
Lets have a look at the dataset enterprises
.
data("enterprises") head(enterprises)
enterprises
is a SpatialPointsDataFrame
object, but sdc_raster
works
equally well with sf
and data.frame
objects with point data (locations).
summary(enterprises)
enterprises
contains two simulated variables: production
(numeric) and
fined
(logical), and we are interested in their spatial distribution.
Let's first plot the locations of enterprises:
sp::plot(enterprises)
There are many locations and a lot of over-plotting or occlusion is taking
place: a better visualization method to reveal spatial patterns in this case
is to create
a raster or density plot. Since we are interested in the spatial distribution
of production
we would like to rasterize the data, which can be done with
raster::rasterize
or ggplot2::geom_tile
but for didactic sake we use
sdc_raster
to create a raster map with a 500m grid.
production <- sdc_raster(enterprises, "production", r = 500) plot(production, value="mean", sensitive=FALSE, main="mean production")
We have plotted the mean production, other stats are kept in the production$value
object:
raster::plot(production$value[[1:3]])
The important question is:
Can we publish this map or does it contain sensitive values?
Let us see how many of the values are sensitive:
print(production)
Printing the production
object shows that when we demand that a raster cell
should at least have 10 observations
(min_count
) and its value should not be dominated by one enterprise
(max_risk
), then r round(100*sensitivity_score(production))
% of the data in the map is sensitive!
For a 500m by 500m block a threshold of 10 enterprises is on the high side, so let us change that into 5:
production$min_count <- 5 production$max_risk <- 0.9 # or equally production <- sdc_raster(enterprises, "production" , r = 500, min_count = 5, max_risk = 0.9) sensitivity_score(production)
The score dropped, but which cells are we talking about?
plot(production) sensitive_cells <- is_sensitive(production)
sensitive_cells
is a raster
which can be used for further inspection.
Let us try to reduce the sensitivity of the map using a smoothing method:
production_smoothed <- protect_smooth(production, bw = 500) plot(production_smoothed)
In this case smoothing reduced the number of sensitive locations drastically!
Let us remove the remaining sensitive cells
production_safe <- remove_sensitive(production_smoothed) sensitivity_score(production_safe) # check, double check
We can improve upon the "blocky" map by using raster::disaggregate
. We can
plot the following:
mean_production <- mean(production_safe) mean_production <- raster::disaggregate(mean_production, 10, "bilinear") # generated with R >= 3.6 # col <- hcl.colors(10, "YlOrRd", rev = TRUE) col <- c("#FFFFC8", "#FEF1B2", "#FADC8A", "#F7C252", "#F5A400", "#F18000", "#EB5500", "#D12D00", "#A90D00", "#7D0025") raster::plot(mean_production, col=col) # library(leaflet) # leaflet() %>% # leaflet::addTiles() %>% # leaflet::addRasterImage(mean_production, colors = col, opacity = 0.5)
protect_quadtree
is also a protecting method, which we demonstrate with
the variable fined
.
First we create a more fine grained (pun not intended) raster for the variable
fined
.
fined <- sdc_raster(enterprises, "fined", min_count = 5, r = 200, max_risk = 0.8) print(fined)
Which is rather sensitive, let us have a look at the locations:
# col <- hcl.colors(10, rev=TRUE) # generated with R >= 3.6 col <- c("#FDE333", "#BBDD38", "#6CD05E", "#00BE7D", "#00A890" , "#008E98", "#007094", "#185086", "#422C70", "#4B0055") plot(fined, "mean", col=col)
The quadtree method aggregates sensitive cells with its 3 neighbors and does this recursively: the result is as follows:
fined_qt <- protect_quadtree(fined) plot(fined_qt, col=col)
which has a sensitivity score of r sensitivity_score(fined_qt)
.
The method has the advantage of locally selecting the necessary resolution to
suppress sensitive values, while the protect_smooth
method uses a fixed bandwidth.
The protection result is blocky in comparison with the smoothing method, but safer if you look at the sensitive cells in high fined areas.
fined_smooth <- protect_smooth(fined, bw = 500, keep_resolution=FALSE) plot(fined_smooth, col = col) sensitivity_score(fined_smooth)
raster
sdcSpatial
builds heavily upon the excellent raster package: it creates raster
maps and uses the machinery of raster
to calculate sensitivity
and to apply protection methods to raster maps.
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