ADT: Anonymization of Diverse Transactional Data

Data anonymization is commonly utilized for the protection of an individual's identity when his personal or sensitive data is published. A well-known anonymization model to define the privacy of transactional data is the km-anonymity model. This model ensures that an adversary who knows up to m items of an individual cannot determine which record in the dataset corresponds to the individual with a probability greater than 1/k. However, the existing techniques generally rely on the presence of similarity between items in the dataset tuples to achieve km-anonymization and are not suitable when transactional data contains tuples without many common values. The authors refer to this type of transactional data as diverse transactional data and propose an algorithm, anonymization of diverse transactional data (ADT). ADT is based on slicing and generalization to achieve km-anonymity for diverse transactional data. ADT has been experimentally evaluated on two datasets, and it has been found that ADT yields higher privacy protection and causes a lower loss in data utility as compared to existing methods.