Advancing Data Privacy: A Novel K-Anonymity Algorithm with Dissimilarity Tree-Based Clustering and Minimal Information Loss

Abstract

Anonymization serves as a crucial privacy protection technique employed across various technology domains, including cloud storage, machine learning, data mining and big data to safeguard sensitive information from unauthorized third-party access. As the significance and volume of data grow exponentially, comprehensive data protection against all threats is of utmost importance. The main objective of this paper is to provide a brief summary of techniques for data anonymization and differential privacy.A new k-anonymity method, which deviates from conventional k-anonymity approaches, is proposed by us to address privacy protection concerns. Our paper presents a new algorithm designed to achieve k-anonymity through more efficient clustering. The processing of data by most clustering algorithms requires substantial computation. However, by identifying initial centers that align with the data structure, a superior cluster arrangement can be obtained.Our study presents a Dissimilarity Tree-based strategy for selecting optimal starting centroids and generating more accurate clusters with reduced computing time and Normalised Certainty Penalty (NCP). This method also has the added benefit of reducing the Normalised Certainty Penalty (NCP). When compared to other methods, the graphical performance analysis shows that this one reduces the amount of overall information lost in the dataset being anonymized by around 20% on average. In addition, the method that we have designed is capable of properly handling both numerical and category characteristics.