Abstract
To protect sensitive information in a cross tabulated table, it is acommon practice to suppress some of the cells. A linear combination of thesuppressed cells is called a linear invariant if it has a unique feasible value.Intuitively, the information contained in a linear invariant is not protectedbecause its value can be uniquely determined. Using a decomposition approach,this paper establishes a fundamental correspondence between linear invariantsof a table and edge cuts of a graph induced from the table. Thiscorrespondence is employed to give a linear-time algorithm for finding animportant class of linear invariants called therow or column linear invariants. In subsequent papers, thiscorrespondence is used to solve via graph theoretic techniques a wide varietyof problems for protecting information in a table.
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Kao, MY. Efficient Detection and Protection of Information in Cross Tabulated Tables II: Minimal Linear Invariants. Journal of Combinatorial Optimization 1, 187–202 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009712000657
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009712000657