87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DOB, gender, zip}

Post by rat » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 8:50 AM UTC

russell wrote: post #44

jdp23 wrote: post #5

Here's some backstory, from the 1990s when the Massachusetts' Group Insurance Commission released "anonymized" health data: ''At the time GIC released the data, William Weld, then Governor of Massachusetts, assured the public that GIC had protected patient privacy by deleting identifiers. In response, then-graduate student Sweeney started hunting for the Governor’s hospital records in the GIC data. She knew that Gove…

I had to deal with the converse of the problem when I was working for a company that ran the vehicle smog checking for the state of Illinois. A driver's license id was composed of birthdate, sex, and some location information (I dont remember exactly what) for the reasons mentioned by jdp23 it worked quite well, except for identical twins, who had the same driver's license id. (Registrations ofter were processed by h…

> Officially I live with a zombie

Not as uncommon as you might think. Plight of the Living Dead(http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2054133,00.htm...)

Post by benmathes » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 5:22 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #67

This is sort of the reverse of the "curse of dimensionality", for those interested in machine learning ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality ). From an ML perspective, as you add dimensions to a dataset, the amount of data you'd need to accurately model the data without overfitting (i.e. without memorizing specific details of the sample rather than underlying trends) grows very fast, because due to t…

The Curse of Dimensionality is a key piece of knowledge to keep in mind anytime you're building some software that searches/sorts/filters/etc. a large dataset and your users keep asking for things like "but I want to search based on !"

Someone has to be the gatekeeper on your dimensions.

Re: 87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DOB, gender, zip}

Re: 87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DOB, gender, zip}