Re-using Methods"

In deident: Persistent Data Anonymization Pipeline

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)

NB: the following is an advanced usage of deident. If you are just getting started we recommend looking at the other vignettes first.

While the deident package implements multiple different methods for deidentification, one of its key advantages is the ability to re-use and share methods across data sets due to the 'stateful' nature of its design.

If you wish to share a unit between different pipelines, the cleanest approach is to initialize the method of interest and then pass it into the first pipeline:

library(deident)

psu <- Pseudonymizer$new()

name_pipe <- starwars |>
  deident(psu, name)

apply_deident(starwars, name_pipe)

Having called apply_deident the Pseudonymizer psu has learned encodings for each string in starwars$name. If these strings appear a second time, they will be replaced in the same way, and we can build a second pipeline using psu:

combined.frm <- data.frame(
  ID = c(head(starwars$name, 5), head(ShiftsWorked$Employee, 5))
)

reused_pipe <- combined.frm |>
  deident(psu, ID)

apply_deident(combined.frm, reused_pipe)

Since the first 5 lines of combined.frm$ID are the same as starwars$ID the first 5 lines of each transformed data set are also the same.

deident documentation built on April 3, 2025, 6:14 p.m.