Definition: Argus

Statistical methodologies

Two software packages for Statistical Disclosure Control are called Argus, μ-ARGUS is a specialized software tool for the protection of microdata. The two main techniques used for this are global recoding and local suppression. In the case of global recoding several categories of a variable are collapsed into a single one. The effect of local suppression is that one or more values in an unsafe combination are suppressed, i.e. replaced by a missing value. Both global recoding and local suppression lead to a loss of information, because either less detailed information is provided or some information is not given at all. τ-ARGUS is a specialized software tool for the protection of tabular data. τ-ARGUS is used to produce safe tables. τ-ARGUS uses the same two main techniques as μ-ARGUS: global recoding and local suppression. For τ-ARGUS the latter consists of suppression of cells in a table.