Initial application of ant colony optimisation to statistical disclosure control

Abstract

In this paper Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) is applied in the field of Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC) for the first time. It has been applied to a permutation problem found in Cell Suppression. ACO has successfully improved the suppression patterns created to protect published statistical tables but when compared to using the Genetic Algorithm (GA) it has not performed as well. It has however performed well enough to merit further investigation into its use in SDC. In particular research into how to construct a distance matrix for the Cell Suppression Problem (CSP) may both improve the performance of ACO when it is applied in that field and provide further insight into SDC.