Generalized bucketization scheme for flexible privacy settings.

Bucketization is an anonymization technique for publishing sensitive data. The idea is to group records into small buckets to obscure the record-level association between sensitive information and identifying information. Compared to the traditional generalization technique, bucketization does not require a taxonomy of attribute values, so is applicable to more data sets. A drawback of previous bucketization schemes is the uniform privacy setting and uniform bucket size, which often results in a non-achievable privacy goal or excessive information loss if sensitive values have variable sensitivity.