Improved privacy preserving method for periodical SRS publishing

Abstract

Spontaneous reporting systems (SRSs) are used to collect adverse drug events (ADEs) for their evaluation and analysis. Periodical SRS data publication gives rise to a problem where sensitive, private data can be discovered through various attacks. The existing SRS data publishing methods are vulnerable to Medicine Discontinuation Attack(MD-attack) and Substantial symptoms-attack(SS-attack). To remedy this problem, an improved periodical SRS data publishing—PPMS(k, θ, ɑ)-bounding is proposed. This new method can recognize MD-attack by ensuring that each equivalence group contains at least k new medicine discontinuation records. The SS-attack can be thwarted using a heuristic algorithm. Theoretical analysis indicates that PPMS(k, θ, ɑ)-bounding can thwart the above-mentioned attacks. The experimental results also demonstrate that PPMS(k, θ, ɑ)-bounding can provide much better protection for privacy than the existing method and the new method dose not increase the information loss. PPMS(k, θ, ɑ)-bounding can improve the privacy, guaranteeing the information usability of the released tables.