Recent years have witnessed ever-increasing concerns about
individual privacy in numerous data dissemination applications
that involve private personal information, e.g., medical data or
census data. Typically, such microdata is stored in a relational
table, each record corresponding to an individual, which can
be divided into three sub-categories: (1) identifier attribute,
e.g., social security number, which can explicitly identify
an individual, and is usually removed from the microdata
for publication; (2) quasi-identifier (QI) attributes, e.g., age,
zip-code, and birth-date, whose values in combination can
potentially identify an individual, and are usually available
from other sources (e.g., voter registration list); (3) sensitive
(SA) attribute, e.g., disease, which is the private information
to be protected for the individuals.