Definition
Microaggregation is a family of masking methods for statistical disclosure control of numerical microdata (although variants for categorical data exist). The rationale behind microaggregation is that confidentiality rules in use allow publication of microdata sets if records correspond to groups of k or more individuals, where no individual dominates (i.e., contributes too much to) the group and k is a threshold value. Strict application of such confidentiality rules leads to replacing individual values with values computed on small aggregates (microaggregates) prior to publication. This is the basic principle of microaggregation.
To obtain microaggregates in a microdata set with n records, these are combined to form g groups of size at least k. For each attribute, the average value over each group is computed and is used to replace each of the original averaged values. Groups are formed using a criterion of maximal similarity. Once the procedure has been completed, the...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsRecommended Reading
Domingo-Ferrer J, Mateo-Sanz JM. Practical data-oriented microaggregation for statistical disclosure control. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng. 2002;14(1):189–201.
Domingo-Ferrer J, Sebé F, Solanas A. A polynomial-time approximation to optimal multivariate microaggregation. Comput Math Appl. 2008;55(4):714–32.
Domingo-Ferrer J, Torra V. Ordinal, continuous and heterogenerous k-anonymity through microaggregation. Data Min Knowl Dis. 2005;11(2):195–212.
Hundepool A, Van de Wetering A, Ramaswamy R, Franconi L, Capobianchi A, DeWolf P-P, Domingo-Ferrer J, Torra V, Brand R, Giessing S. μ-ARGUS version 4.0 software and user’s manual. Statistics Netherlands, Voorburg, May 2005. http://neon.vb.cbs.nl/casc
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this entry
Cite this entry
Domingo-Ferrer, J. (2018). Microaggregation. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1496
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1496
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-8266-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-8265-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering