Data Anonymization through Collaborative Multi-view Microaggregation
Sarah Zouinina, Younès Bennani, Nicoleta Rogovschi, Abdelouahid Lyhyaoui · Journal of Intelligent Systems · 2020
Abstract The interest in data anonymization is exponentially growing, motivated by the will of the governments to open their data. The main challenge of data anonymization is to find a balance between data utility and the amount of disclosure risk. One of the most known frameworks of data anonymization is k -anonymity, this method assumes that a dataset is anonymous if and only if for each element of the dataset, there exist at least k − 1 elements identical to it. In this paper, we propose two techniques to achieve k -anonymity through microaggregation: k -CMVM and Constrained-CMVM. Both, use topological collaborative clustering to obtain k -anonymous data. The first one determines the k levels automatically and the second defines it by exploration. We also improved the results of these two approaches by using pLVQ2 as a weighted vector quantization method. The four methods proposed were proven to be efficient using two data utility measures, the separability utility and the structural utility. The experimental results have shown a very promising performance.