INFERENCE CONTROL METHOD IN A DATA CUBE

A system for editing the dimension structure associated with a data cube is revealed. The editing may be used to enforce given criteria on the cube. This includes modifying the cube in order to satisfy regulations requiring researchers to protect information about individuals, such as medical, genealogy and genetics records. The inference control methods disclosed therefore enable safe aggregated datasets to be released to researchers. When combined with information theoretic methods, the invention method of editing the dimension structures may be used to express clearly and discover correlations that exist in the dataset. This mining of the data and editing of the dimension structure allows the user of a simple multidimensional cube viewer to visually verify the patterns discovered.