A scalable software solution for anonymizing high-dimensional biomedical data

Abstract

Background: Data anonymization is an important building block for ensuring privacy and fosters the reuse of data. However, transforming the data in a way that preserves the privacy of subjects while maintaining a high degree of data quality is challenging and particularly difficult when processing complex datasets that contain a high number of attributes. In this article we present how we extended the open source software ARX to improve its support for high-dimensional, biomedical datasets.

Findings: For improving ARX's capability to find optimal transformations when processing high-dimensional data, we implement 2 novel search algorithms. The first is a greedy top-down approach and is oriented on a formally implemented bottom-up search. The second is based on a genetic algorithm. We evaluated the algorithms with different datasets, transformation methods, and privacy models. The novel algorithms mostly outperformed the previously implemented bottom-up search. In addition, we extended the GUI to provide a high degree of usability and performance when working with high-dimensional datasets.

Conclusion: With our additions we have significantly enhanced ARX's ability to handle high-dimensional data in terms of processing performance as well as usability and thus can further facilitate data sharing.

Keywords: anonymization; biomedical data; data privacy; data protection; de-identification; genetic algorithm; heuristics; privacy preserving data publishing; software tool.