Privacy-preserving data publishing for cluster analysis

  • Authors:
  • Benjamin C. M. Fung;Ke Wang;Lingyu Wang;Patrick C. K. Hung

  • Affiliations:
  • Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada H3G 1M8;School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, BC, Canada V5A 1S6;Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada H3G 1M8;Faculty of Business and Information Technology, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, ON, Canada L1H 7K4

  • Venue:
  • Data & Knowledge Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Releasing person-specific data could potentially reveal sensitive information about individuals. k-anonymization is a promising privacy protection mechanism in data publishing. Although substantial research has been conducted on k-anonymization and its extensions in recent years, only a few prior works have considered releasing data for some specific purpose of data analysis. This paper presents a practical data publishing framework for generating a masked version of data that preserves both individual privacy and information usefulness for cluster analysis. Experiments on real-life data suggest that by focusing on preserving cluster structure in the masking process, the cluster quality is significantly better than the cluster quality of the masked data without such focus. The major challenge of masking data for cluster analysis is the lack of class labels that could be used to guide the masking process. Our approach converts the problem into the counterpart problem for classification analysis, wherein class labels encode the cluster structure in the data, and presents a framework to evaluate the cluster quality on the masked data.