A tool for producing synthetic versions of microdata containing confidential information so that they are safe to be released to users for exploratory analysis. The key objective of generating synthetic data is to replace sensitive original values with synthetic ones causing minimal distortion of the statistical information contained in the data set. Variables, which can be categorical or continuous, are synthesised one-by-one using sequential modelling. Replacements are generated by drawing from conditional distributions fitted to the original data using parametric or classification and regression trees models. Data are synthesised via the function syn() which can be largely automated, if default settings are used, or with methods defined by the user. Optional parameters can be used to influence the disclosure risk and the analytical quality of the synthesised data. For a description of the implemented method see Nowok, Raab and Dibben (2016) <doi:10.18637/jss.v074.i11>.

A set of functions to support experimentation in the utility of partially synthetic data sets.  All functions compare an observed data set to one or a set of partially synthetic data sets derived from the observed data to (1) check that data sets have identical attributes, (2) calculate overall and specific variable perturbation rates, (3) check for potential logical inconsistencies, and (4) calculate confidence intervals and standard errors of desired variables in multiple imputed data sets. Confidence interval and standard error formulas have options for either synthetic data sets or multiple imputed data sets. For more information on the formulas and methods used, see Reiter & Raghunathan (2007) <doi:10.1198/016214507000000932>.

Drop-in replacements for the base system2() function with fine control
    and consistent behavior across platforms. Supports clean interruption, timeout, 
    background tasks, and streaming STDIN / STDOUT / STDERR over binary or text 
    connections. Arguments on Windows automatically get encoded and quoted to work 
    on different locales.