Genetic algorithm-based clustering approach for k-anonymization

  • Authors:
  • Jun-Lin Lin;Meng-Cheng Wei

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Information Management, Yuan Ze University, 135 Yuan-Tung Road, Chung-Li 320, Taiwan;Department of Information Management, Yuan Ze University, 135 Yuan-Tung Road, Chung-Li 320, Taiwan

  • Venue:
  • Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

k-Anonymity has been widely adopted as a model for protecting public released microdata from individual identification. This model requires that each record must be identical to at least k-1 other records in the anonymized dataset with respect to a set of privacy-related attributes. Although anonymizing the original dataset to satisfy the requirement of k-anonymity is easy, the anonymized dataset must preserve as much information as possible of the original dataset. Clustering techniques have recently been successfully adapted for k-anonymization. This work proposes a novel genetic algorithm-based clustering approach for k-anonymization. The proposed approach adopts various heuristics to select genes for crossover operations. Experimental results show that this approach can further reduce the information loss caused by traditional clustering-based k-anonymization techniques.