International Business Machines Corporation
Detecting quasi-identifiers in datasets

Abstract:

Quasi-identifiers (QIDs) are detected in a dataset using a set of computing tasks. The dataset has a plurality of records and a set of attributes. An index is generated for the dataset. The index has an indicator for each attribute value of each record in the dataset. Each indicator specifies all the records in the dataset having the same value for the attribute. Each task is assigned an attribute combination and a subset of the plurality of records in the dataset and is passed to a thread for execution on computing resources. The executing task inspects the set of records specified by the index indicator for each attribute value in the attribute combination to produce a result. The result of at least one task identifies a unique record for the associated attribute combination. The attribute combination producing the unique record is a QID.