Disclosure Avoidance for the 2020 Census Demographic and Housing Characteristics File

In "The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System TopDown Algorithm," Abowd et al. (2022) describe the concepts and methods used by the Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS) to produce formally private output in support of the 2020 Census data product releases, with a particular focus on the DAS implementation that was used to create the 2020 Census Redistricting Data (P.L. 94-171) Summary File. In this paper we describe the updates to the DAS that were required to release the Demographic and Housing Characteristics (DHC) File, which provides more granular tables than other data products, such as the Redistricting Data Summary File. We also describe the final configuration parameters used for the production DHC DAS implementation, as well as subsequent experimental data products to facilitate development of tools that provide confidence intervals for confidential 2020 Census tabulations.