A deterministic approach for protecting privacy in sensitive personal data
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A deterministic approach for protecting privacy in sensitive personal data. / Avraam, Demetris; Jones, Elinor; Burton, Paul.
In: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2022, p. 24.Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - A deterministic approach for protecting privacy in sensitive personal data
AU - Avraam, Demetris
AU - Jones, Elinor
AU - Burton, Paul
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022. The Author(s).
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - BACKGROUND: Data privacy is one of the biggest challenges for any organisation which processes personal data, especially in the area of medical research where data include sensitive information about patients and study participants. Sharing of data is therefore problematic, which is at odds with the principle of open data that is so important to the advancement of society and science. Several statistical methods and computational tools have been developed to help data custodians and analysts overcome this challenge. METHODS: In this paper, we propose a new deterministic approach for anonymising personal data. The method stratifies the underlying data by the categorical variables and re-distributes the continuous variables through a k nearest neighbours based algorithm. RESULTS: We demonstrate the use of the deterministic anonymisation on real data, including data from a sample of Titanic passengers, and data from participants in the 1958 Birth Cohort. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed procedure makes data re-identification difficult while minimising the loss of utility (by preserving the spatial properties of the underlying data); the latter means that informative statistical analysis can still be conducted.
AB - BACKGROUND: Data privacy is one of the biggest challenges for any organisation which processes personal data, especially in the area of medical research where data include sensitive information about patients and study participants. Sharing of data is therefore problematic, which is at odds with the principle of open data that is so important to the advancement of society and science. Several statistical methods and computational tools have been developed to help data custodians and analysts overcome this challenge. METHODS: In this paper, we propose a new deterministic approach for anonymising personal data. The method stratifies the underlying data by the categorical variables and re-distributes the continuous variables through a k nearest neighbours based algorithm. RESULTS: We demonstrate the use of the deterministic anonymisation on real data, including data from a sample of Titanic passengers, and data from participants in the 1958 Birth Cohort. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed procedure makes data re-identification difficult while minimising the loss of utility (by preserving the spatial properties of the underlying data); the latter means that informative statistical analysis can still be conducted.
KW - Data privacy
KW - Deterministic anonymisation
KW - Disclosure risk
KW - Information loss
KW - k nearest neighbours
U2 - 10.1186/s12911-022-01754-4
DO - 10.1186/s12911-022-01754-4
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 35090447
AN - SCOPUS:85123876917
VL - 22
SP - 24
JO - BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
JF - BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
SN - 1472-6947
IS - 1
ER -
ID: 291532161