cellsynth - Cell-Wise Synthetic Copies of De-Identified Tables

Turns de-identified tables ('Excel' workbooks or delimited text files) into synthetic counterparts with the same layout, the same identifiers and the same data-entry quirks. Every non-identifier cell, missingness included, is censored once per sweep and redrawn by copying the raw value of a donor drawn from a classification and regression tree leaf fitted on the rest of the table, in the spirit of the sequential tree-based synthesis of Reiter (2005) "Using CART to generate partially synthetic public use microdata", Journal of Official Statistics 21(3):441-462, and Nowok, Raab and Dibben (2016) <doi:10.18637/jss.v074.i11>. Identifiers are kept so that tables stay joinable, and columns of other tables can condition the synthesis so cross-table associations survive a later join. Synthetic copies are intended for developing and testing analysis code; they are not an anonymisation method.