US Patent 9665735 Privacy fractal mirroring of transaction data

The tool to provide anonymous data in response to a request for information is configured to receiving a request for information relating to a population of interest from a user; determining criteria associated with the population of interest, wherein the criteria define an individual representative of the population of interest; determining a characteristic of the individual within one or more categories; classifying the characteristic of the individual into a cluster, the cluster comprising a subset of all possible outcomes for the category; classifying a plurality of individuals from a database into clusters based on the one or more categories; determining a subset of the plurality of individuals that are similar to the individual representative of the population of interest based on the clusters; transforming the characteristics of the individuals in the subset to generate anonymous data responsive to the request for information; and providing the anonymous data to the user.