Patent ID: 9230132
Filing Date: 2016-01-05
CPC Classification: G06F

Claim Text:
1. A method of anonymizing data comprising: receiving at a hardware processor, input comprising a dataset having both a relational data part and a sequential data part, the sequential part is data representing a sequence-of-sequences in which a sequence comprises elements that are sequences; identifying from said dataset direct identifier attributes corresponding to entities; masking or suppressing attribute values corresponding to said identified direct identifier attributes; ranking records based on a similarity with respect to a defined cost function F; selecting and iteratively anonymizing each set of at least k first records as ranked using the defined cost function F, each set of at least k records comprising a group, said anonymizing attribute values along both the relational part and the sequential part, wherein k is a specified k-anonymization parameter; and repeating said selecting and iteratively anonymizing each successive set of at least k records of successive groups said anonymizing attribute values along both the relational part and the sequential part of records therein to generate anonymized table representations of said dataset resulting from said anonymization, and outputting said anonymized table representations to an output device, said anonymized table representations guaranteeing no attacker can re-identify the direct identifier attributes of any entity in the dataset with a certain probability.