Development of synthetic microdata for educational use in Japan

Japan’s new Statistics Act has come fully into effect in April 2009. The new law allows access to Anonymized microdata, and at the same time it requires users to go through an application process and imposes some restrictions. The National Statistics Center (NSTAC) has developed a type of microdata which can be accessed without an application process and used without restrictions. These data do not contain original microdata, but consist of Synthetic microdata. The absence of an application process and usage restrictions make Synthetic microdata particularly suitable for educational use. This paper outlines the process for creating Synthetic microdata for educational use based on multi-dimensional tables derived from original microdata, and compares the characteristics of them.