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Transactions on Rough Sets VII pp 256–273Cite as

Granulation as a Privacy Protection Mechanism

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((TRS,volume 4400))

Abstract

How to achieve a balance between data publication and privacy protection has been an important issue in information security for several years. When microdata is released to users, attributes that clearly identify individuals are usually removed. Nevertheless, it is still possible to link released data with some public or easy-to-access databases to obtain confidential information. To safeguard privacy, numerous techniques, such as generalization, suppression, and microaggregation, have been proposed to modify the to-be-released data. In this paper, we propose attribute-oriented granulation as a data protection mechanism that can integrate both generalization and microaggregation into a uniform framework. We address the computational issue of searching for the most specific granulation that satisfies confidentiality requirements. A breadth-first search algorithm with basic pruning strategies is presented and its properties are investigated. The properties can be used to improve the efficiency of our algorithm. We also define some quantitative measures of data quality and security, and apply evolutionary computation techniques to find the optimal granulation for privacy protection.

A preliminary version of this paper was published in ?. This work was partially supported by the Taiwan Information Security Center (TWISC) and NSC (Taiwan). NSC Grants: 95-2221-E-001-019 (D.W. Wang), 95-2221-E-001-029-MY3 (C.J. Liau), and 95-2221-E-001-004 (T-s. Hsu).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei 115, Taiwan

    Da-Wei Wang, Churn-Jung Liau & Tsan-sheng Hsu

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  1. Da-Wei Wang
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  2. Churn-Jung Liau
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  3. Tsan-sheng Hsu
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James F. Peters Andrzej Skowron Victor W. Marek Ewa Orłowska Roman Słowiński Wojciech Ziarko

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Wang, DW., Liau, CJ., Hsu, Ts. (2007). Granulation as a Privacy Protection Mechanism. In: Peters, J.F., Skowron, A., Marek, V.W., Orłowska, E., Słowiński, R., Ziarko, W. (eds) Transactions on Rough Sets VII. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4400. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71663-1_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71663-1_16

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