Synthesizing Surveys with Multiple Units of Observation: An Application to the Longitudinal Aging Study in India.

ABSTRACT: We present methodology for creating synthetic data and an application to create a publicly releasable synthetic version of the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI). The LASI, a health and retirement survey, is used for research and educational purposes, but it can only be shared under restricted access due to privacy considerations. We present novel methods to synthesize the survey, maintaining three nested levels of observation-individuals, couples, and households-with both continuous and categorical variables and survey weights. We show that the synthetic data maintains the distributional patterns of the confidential data and largely mitigates identification and attribute disclosure risk. We also present a novel method for controlling the risk and utility tradeoff for the synthetic d

SUBMITTER: Snoke J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12596149 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature