Patent ID: 8316054

Claim:
A method of performing risk assessment of a dataset from a source database containing information identifiable to individuals, the method executed by a computer processor comprising: retrieving the dataset comprising a plurality of records from a storage device; receiving a selection of variables from a user, the selection made from a plurality of variables present in the dataset, wherein the variables are identifiers that are associated with personal information to identify one or more individuals from the one or more of the plurality of records; receiving a selection of a risk threshold acceptable for the dataset from a user; receiving a selection of a sampling fraction wherein the sampling fraction defines a relative size of the dataset to an entire population represented by the source database; determining a number of records from the plurality of records in the dataset for each equivalence class for each of the selected variables present in the dataset; calculating a re-identification risk of one or more records of the dataset using the selected sampling fraction and the determined number of records for each equivalence class, wherein the re-identification risk is calculated by [expmuo*power(μ o , λ)]/[λ!*(1−expmuo)] with an increasing index λ, starting at 1 and increment by 1, until the re-identification risk is greater than or equal to 0.1 where μ o =sampling fraction/risk threshold, expmuo=exp(−μ o ), power(μ o , λ)=μ o λ , and seqv=size of the smallest equivalence class in the dataset; displaying the calculated re-identification risk relative to the selected risk threshold; and wherein the re-identification risk is defined as the risk of matching a record stored in the dataset with a record stored in a public database thereby providing identifying information of a person associated with the record.