Set-valued Data Anonymization Maintaining Data Utility and Data Property

Abstract

Set-valued database publication has been attracting much attention due to its benefit for various applications like recommendation systems and marketing analysis. However, publishing original database directly is risky since an unauthorized party may violate individual privacy by associating and analyzing relations between individuals and set of items in the published database, which is known as identity linkage attack. Generally, an attack is performed based on attacker's background knowledge obtained by a prior investigation and such adversary knowledge should be taken into account in the data anonymization. Various data anonymization schemes have been proposed to prevent the identity linkage attack. However, in existing data anonymization schemes, either data utility or data property is reduced a lot after excessive database modification and consequently data recipients become to distrust the released database. In this paper, we propose a new data anonymization scheme, called sibling suppression, which causes minimum data utility lost and maintains data properties like database size and the number of records. The scheme uses multiple sets of adversary knowledge and items in a category of adversary knowledge are replaced by other items in the category. Several experiments with real dataset show that our method can preserve data utility with minimum lost and maintain data property as the same as original database.