Data analytics is increasingly being used as a key decisionmaking tool, including in Pacific communities. But a practice of statistical data suppression (SDS) aimed at privacy protection runs the risk of negatively impacting small island populations, leading to “statistical invisibility.”
In a new peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Pacific Health Dialog, the Chaminade/CIFAL Honolulu Data/AI Research Team (DART) explores the issue and seeks to provide Hawaiʻi and Pacific stakeholders with a framework to better navigate SDS. Importantly, “Navigating Protection and Presence: Trade-offs around data suppression for small Pacific populations” shines a light on data suppression practices in Census and CDC datasets.
The research was supported by National Science Foundation funding and conducted in partnership with the University of Hawaiʻi John A. Burns School of Medicine, the University of Waikato, and the UH Center for Indigenous Innovation and Health Equity.
Helen Turner, Ph.D., lead author for the article and research director at Chaminade’s UN CIFAL Honolulu, said she is proud of the research “because it surfaces an important and often hidden issue in science that may be specifically impacting our regional communities as they start to engage data analytics, AI and machine learning in their decision-making processes.”
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In the article, the authors recommend inclusive, transparent practices to prevent data suppression and propose alternative strategies grounded in “critical data theory” as a way to inform policies that balance the protection of individual privacy with representation of small populations.
Turner applauded the members of the DART team exploring the issue, including lead analyst Connor Flynn ’21, an author on the paper who started the work with his sister—co-author Lilliana Flynn ’21—when they were Chaminade undergraduates.
“It’s amazing to now see them as data professionals working on both the practice and policy issues that affect our communities,” Turner said.
Flynn note that the real-world projects he tackled while studying data science as an undergraduate inspired him to pursue a master’s degree in environmental data science at the University of California, Santa Barbara and then return to Chaminade to work with DART.
“Now that I mentor undergraduates in research experiences and teach data science classes myself, I’m bringing that same approach to my teaching,” he said.
“I’m hoping many more students can make these kinds of meaningful contributions by being involved in applied data science research for Hawaii and the Pacific region.”
Pacific Health Dialog is the Journal of Pacific Research for the Pacific region, and is the only Medline listed medical and public health journal published specifically for Pacific Island countries.
Also in August, DART announced that a separate research paper exploring data on ahi consumption and mercury levels in the blood was accepted for the Toxicology and Pedagogy tracks of the SSRN eJournal. Lead author Alii Napoleon ’25, a Hoʻoulu and NSF S-STEM Scholar, completed the research as part of his data science studies at Chaminade.
The paper uses advanced statistics to probe a national nutritional dataset and offers a risk-benefit framework relevant to communities that consume deep sea fish.
Grant awards that supported this work: NSF HRD-2217242, NSF DUE-2030654.