F-Classify: Fuzzy Rule Based Classification Method for Privacy Preservation of Multiple Sensitive Attributes.

Journal: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Published Date:

Abstract

With the advent of smart health, smart cities, and smart grids, the amount of data has grown swiftly. When the collected data is published for valuable information mining, privacy turns out to be a key matter due to the presence of sensitive information. Such sensitive information comprises either a single sensitive attribute (an individual has only one sensitive attribute) or multiple sensitive attributes (an individual can have multiple sensitive attributes). Anonymization of data sets with multiple sensitive attributes presents some unique problems due to the correlation among these attributes. Artificial intelligence techniques can help the data publishers in anonymizing such data. To the best of our knowledge, no fuzzy logic-based privacy model has been proposed until now for privacy preservation of multiple sensitive attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy preserving model that uses fuzzy logic for the classification of quasi-identifier and multiple sensitive attributes. Classes are defined based on defined rules, and every tuple is assigned to its class according to attribute value. The working of the F-Classify Algorithm is also verified using HLPN. A wide range of experiments on healthcare data sets acknowledged that F-Classify surpasses its counterparts in terms of privacy and utility. Being based on artificial intelligence, it has a lower execution time than other approaches.

Authors

  • Hasina Attaullah
    Department of Computer Sciences, COMSATS University, Islamabad 45550, Pakistan.
  • Adeel Anjum
    Department of Computer Sciences, COMSATS University, Islamabad 45550, Pakistan.
  • Tehsin Kanwal
    Department of Computer Sciences, COMSATS University, Islamabad 45550, Pakistan.
  • Saif Ur Rehman Malik
    Department of Computer Sciences, COMSATS University, Islamabad 45550, Pakistan.
  • Alia Asheralieva
    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China.
  • Hassan Malik
    Department of Computer Science, Edge Hill University, Lancashire L39 4QP, UK.
  • Ahmed Zoha
    Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Surrey, Surrey, United Kingdom.
  • Kamran Arshad
    College of Engineering and IT, Ajman University, Ajman 20550, United Arab Emirates.
  • Muhammad Ali Imran
    James Watt School of EngineeringUniversity of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ U.K.