Enhancing aggregation phase of microaggregation methods for interval disclosure risk minimization

Abstract

Microaggregation is a masking mechanism to protect confidential data in a public release. This technique can produce a k-anonymous dataset where data records are partitioned into groups of at least k members. In each group, a representative centroid is computed by aggregating the group members and is published instead of the original records. In a conventional microaggregation algorithm, the centroids are computed based on simple arithmetic mean of group members. This naïve formulation does not consider the proximity of the published values to the original ones, so an intruder may be able to guess the original values. This paper proposes a disclosureaware aggregation model, where published values are computed in a given distance from the original ones to attain a more protected and useful published dataset. Empirical results show the superiority of the proposed method in achieving a better trade-off point between disclosure risk and information loss in comparison with other similar anonymization techniques.