Anonymization Based on Improved Bucketization (AIB): A Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing Technique for Improving Data Utility in Healthcare Data

Abstract

Data sharing is essential in present biomedical research. A large quantity of medical information is gathered and for different objectives of analysis and study. Because of its large collection, anonymity is essential. Thus, it is quite important to preserve privacy and prevent leakage of sensitive information of patients. Most of the Anonymization methods such as generalisation, suppression and perturbation are proposed to overcome the information leak which degrades the utility of the collected data. During data sanitization, the utility is automatically diminished. Privacy Preserving Data Publishing faces the main drawback of maintaining tradeoff between privacy and data utility. To address this issue, an efficient algorithm called Anonymization based on Improved Bucketization (AIB) is proposed, which increases the utility of published data while maintaining privacy. The Bucketization technique is used in this paper with the intervention of the clustering method. The proposed work is divided into three stages: (i) Vertical and Horizontal partitioning (ii) Assigning Sensitive index to attributes in the cluster (iii) Verifying each cluster against privacy threshold (iv) Examining for privacy breach in Quasi Identifier (QI). To increase the utility of published data, the threshold value is determined based on the distribution of elements in each attribute, and the anonymization method is applied only to the specific QI element. As a result, the data utility has been improved. Finally, the evaluation results validated the design of paper and demonstrated that our design is effective in improving data utility.