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

Abstract

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.