View article

Privacy becomes a more and more serious concern in applications involving microdata. Recently, efficient anonymization has attracted much research work. Most of the previous methods use global recoding, which maps the domains of the quasi-identifier attributes to generalized or changed values. However, global recoding may not always achieve effective anonymization in terms of discernability and query answering accuracy using the anonymized data. Moreover, anonymized data is often for analysis. As well accepted in many analytical applications, different attributes in a data set may have different utility in the analysis. The utility of attributes has not been considered in the previous methods.In this paper, we study the problem of utility-based anonymization. First, we propose a simple framework to specify utility of attributes. The framework covers both numeric and categorical data. Second, we develop two …