Post-Masking Optimization of the Tradeoff between Information Loss and Disclosure Risk in Masked Microdata Sets

Previous work by these authors has been directed to measuring the performance of microdata masking methods in terms of information loss and disclosure risk. Based on the proposed metrics, we show here how to improve the performance of any particular masking method. In particular, post-masking optimization is discussed for preserving as much as possible the moments of first and second order (and thus multivariate statistics) without increasing the disclosure risk. The technique proposed can also be used for synthetic microdata generation and can be extended to preservation of all moments up to m-th order, for any m.