Fuzzy microaggregation for the transparency principle

Abstract

Microaggregation has been proven to be an effective method for data protection in the areas of Privacy Preserving Data Mining (PPDM) and Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC). This method consists of applying a clustering method to the data set to be protected, and then replacing each of the data by the cluster representative.

In this paper we propose a new method for microaggregation based on fuzzy clustering. This new approach has been defined with the main goal of being nondeterministic on the assignment of cluster centers to the original data, and at the same time being simple in its definition. Being nondeterministic permits us to overcome some of the attacks standard microaggregation suffers.