Efficient Anonymizations with Enhanced Utility

  • Authors:
  • Jacob Goldberger;Tamir Tassa

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Engineering/ Bar-Ilan University/ Ramat-Gan/ Israel. e-mail: goldbej@eng.biu.ac.il;Division of Computer Science/ The Open University/ Ra'anana/ Israel. e-mail: tamirta@openu.ac.il

  • Venue:
  • Transactions on Data Privacy
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

One of the most well studied models of privacy preservation is k-anonymity. Previous studies of k-anonymization used various utility measures that aim at enhancing the correlation between the original public data and the generalized public data. We, bearing in mind that a primary goal in releasing the anonymized database for datamining is to deducemethods of predicting the private data from the public data, propose a new information-theoretic measure that aims at enhancing the correlation between the generalized public data and the private data. Such a measure significantly enhances the utility of the released anonymized database for data mining. We then proceed to describe a new algorithm that is designed to achieve k-anonymity with high utility, independently of the underlying utility measure. That algorithm is based on a modified version of sequential clustering which is the method of choice in clustering. Experimental comparison with four well known algorithms of k-anonymity show that the sequential clustering algorithm is an efficient algorithm that achieves the best utility results. We also describe a modification of the algorithm that outputs k-anonymizations which respect the additional security measure of l-diversity.