Diversity-Aware Anonymization for Structured Health Data

Patients' health data are captured by local hospital facilities, which has the potential for data analysis. However, due to privacy and legal concerns, local hospital facilities are unable to share the data with others which makes it difficult to apply data analysis and machine learning techniques over the health data. Analysis of such data across hospitals can provide valuable information to health professionals. Anonymization methods offer privacy-preserving solutions for sharing data for analysis purposes. In this paper, we propose a novel method for anonymizing and sharing data that addresses the record-linkage and attribute-linkage attack models. Our proposed method achieves anonymity by formulating and solving this problem as a constrained optimization problem which is based on the k-anonymity, l-diversity, and t-closeness privacy models. The proposed method has been evaluated with respect to the utility and privacy of data after anonymization in comparison to the original data.