This is the release of the source code and documentation for the US Census Bureau's Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS) which is used to protect individual responses from the 2020 Decennial Census of Population and Housing. This particular release consists of the code used to generate the inputs used to tabulate the Public Law 94-171 Redistricting Data Summary Files, which are used, notably, for redistricting and official population counts.
A unique benefit of differentially private systems like the DAS is that they are fully transparent; they are designed to allow full disclosure of the algorithm code and the privacy parameters that underpin the random assignment of noise infusion into the unprotected data. This release allows individuals to analyze and understand the code and parameters used in the disclosure avoidance process for this important federal data publication.
This release contains the actual code and parameters that were used to transform the Census Edited File (CEF) produced by the enumeration of the 2020 Census into a Microdata Detail File (MDF) that was then used to create the summary file tabulations for the redistricting data release.
Technical documentation of the DAS implementation can be found in the wiki associated with this repostitory. In addition, papers describing the underlying methods and mathematics will be linked in the wiki and added to the doc folder in this repository as they are released.