A New Approach for Anonymizing Transaction Data with Set Values

Abstract

This article proposes a new method that can guarantee strong privacy while minimizing information loss in transactional data composed of a set of each attribute value in a relational database, which is not generally well-known structured data. The proposed scheme adopts the same top-down partitioning algorithm as the existing k-anonymity model, using local generalization to optimize safety and CPU execution time. At the same time, the information loss rate, which is a disadvantage of the existing local generalization, is further improved by reallocating transactions through an additional bottom-up tree search process after the partitioning process. Our scheme shows a very fast processing time compared to the HgHs algorithm using generalization and deletion techniques. In terms of information loss, our scheme shows much better performance than any schemes proposed so far, such as the existing local generalization or HgHs algorithm. In order to evaluate the efficiency of our algorithm, the experiment compared its performance with the existing local generalization and the HgHs algorithm, in terms of both execution time and information loss rate. As a result of the experiment, for example, when k is 5 in k-anonymity for the dataset BMS-WebView-2, the execution time of our scheme is up to 255 times faster than the HgHs algorithm, and with regard to the information loss rate, our method showed a maximum rate of 62.37 times lower than the local generalization algorithm.