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Data Masking Components: Date Of Birth
{TOC}
Date Of Birth
Usage Instructions:
Purpose
The purpose of the component is to mask values of date and datetime data types, especially date of birth. The component makes necessary allowance for the k-anonymity requirement in terms of sparsity of centenarians or people close to centenarians in age in general population. Tch allowance is a requirement in HIPAA 18 elements
Algorithm
Description
The Masking Date of Birth component provides generic date handling. It expects a string in the date format (‘MM/DD/YYYY) and can be used to mask any date.The component also allows selection of the interval of confidence in days that defines interval of variation for the date. The date itself is in the middle, interval values add both positive and negative numbers of days to the date. Example: if May, 1st 2000 is the date, defining an interval of confidence as two days will produce April 29th, April 30th, May 1st, May 2nd, and May 3rd as values.
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Usage Instructions:
| 1. Configure a source that contains the column with Date type value or any other date type. |
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| 2. Drag and Drop Date of Birth data masking component, connect the source and the Date of Birth component with the source's precedence constraint: |
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| 3. Now, the precedence constraint (the blue arrow) passes proper meta-data to the Date of Birth component. If you click on the constraint, you will see: |
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| 4. Now that the metadata for the DOB exists, and values are passed into the data masking component, please open the component editor: |
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| 5. In the second tab, there are input columns. Please check-mark only one column, the one that you will be masking with Date of Birth algorithm: |
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| 6. This will create an extra column with the prefix “Masked_”. |
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| 7. Create a connection manager for the destination and configure source component for the destination. In the connection manager, in the tab “Mappings”, specify that you want newly created Field_Masked to be a field replacing the original value. For that, just click on the available input columns, choose the masked value, and map to the “Available Destination Columns” |
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| 8. Now, all the configurations are complete for the valid values. You can run the package with the Date of Birth Data Masking component, and see the results of data masking: |
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Error Handling
| 9. If, however, there are invalid values in the package's source, one would need to configure error handling. Invalid values are those that are not conforming to the rules of the entity. To handle invalid values, each data masking component has error handling precedence constraint. One needs to create error destination connection and connect red arrow (error handling constraint) with this destination. As the connection is made, one needs to configure the state of failure: “Fail”,”Ignore” or “Redirect”. |
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| 10. It is recommended that one re-directs the output into the error destination, so that later one be able to analyze and process data for quality purposes. The Date of Birth components errors are the only ones not recommended for further processing as it is truly hard to break their format. |
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| 11. It is our suggestion that with Date of Birth component one should not process erroneous data without further analysis at all. |
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