An Approach to Reducing Information Loss and Achieving Diversity of Sensitive Attributes in k-anonymity Methods

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) enable the sharing of patients’ medical data. Since EHRs include patients’ private data, access by researchers is restricted. Therefore k-anonymity is necessary to keep patients’ private data safe without damaging useful medical information. However, k-an...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yoo, Sunyong, Shin, Moonshik, Lee, Doheon
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: JMIR Publications 2012-11-01
Series:Interactive Journal of Medical Research
Online Access:http://www.i-jmr.org/2012/2/e14/
Description
Summary:Electronic Health Records (EHRs) enable the sharing of patients’ medical data. Since EHRs include patients’ private data, access by researchers is restricted. Therefore k-anonymity is necessary to keep patients’ private data safe without damaging useful medical information. However, k-anonymity cannot prevent sensitive attribute disclosure. An alternative, l-diversity, has been proposed as a solution to this problem and is defined as: each Q-block (ie, each set of rows corresponding to the same value for identifiers) contains at least l well-represented values for each sensitive attribute. While l-diversity protects against sensitive attribute disclosure, it is limited in that it focuses only on diversifying sensitive attributes.
ISSN:1929-073X