Systematic Evaluation of Probabilistic k-Anonymity for Privacy Preserving Micro-data Publishing and Analysis

Abstract

In the light of stringent privacy laws, data anonymization not only supports privacy preserving data publication (PPDP) but also improves the flexibility of micro-data analysis. Machine learning (ML) is widely used for personal data analysis in the present day thus, it is paramount to understand how to effectively use data anonymization in the ML context. In this work, we introduce an anonymization framework based on the notion of "probabilistic k-anonymity" that can be applied with respect to mixed datasets while addressing the challenges brought forward by the existing syntactic privacy models in the context of ML. Through systematic empirical evaluation, we show that the proposed approach can effectively limit the disclosure risk in micro-data publishing while maintaining a high utility for the ML models induced from the anonymized data.