Patent ID: 8209342

Claim:
A computer program product for disguising data structures, comprising a non-transitory computer readable medium having computer readable program code embodied therein, the computer readable program code comprising: computer readable program code configured to form a data structure that includes at least one partition containing non-confidential quasi-identifier microdata and at least one other partition containing confidential microdata; computer readable program code configured to disguise the confidential microdata by transforming the confidential microdata to conform to a target distribution; computer readable program code configured to combine the confidential microdata that was disguised and the quasi-identifier microdata to generate a disguised data structure; computer readable program code configured to disguise the confidential microdata by substituting in place of each member of the confidential microdata a plurality of values having a distribution that conforms to the target distribution; and computer readable program code configured to form a binary tree data structure which associates members of the confidential microdata as node values at a base tier, which successively determines for each node at next-higher tiers of the data structure a set of values which includes values from the next-lower tier, and a root node of the binary tree data structure has a weight of one and weights of values of successively next-lower tiers are determined by multiplying a weight of the next-higher tier by a weight of an edge inter-tier branch therebetween divided by a sum of the inter-tier branch weights leading from a particular tier to all of its next-lower tiers, wherein the branch weights associated with the base tier define the target distribution.