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.