On disclosure risk analysis of anonymized itemsets in the presence of prior knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Decision makers of companies often face the dilemma of whether to release data for knowledge discovery, vis-a-vis the risk of disclosing proprietary or sensitive information. Among the various methods employed for “sanitizing” the data prior to disclosure, we focus in this article on anonymization, given its widespread use in practice. We do due diligence to the question “just how safe is the anonymized data?” We consider both those scenarios when the hacker has no information and, more realistically, when the hacker may have partial information about items in the domain. We conduct our analyses in the context of frequent set mining and address the safety question at two different levels: (i) how likely of being cracked (i.e., re-identified by a hacker), are the identities of individual items and (ii) how likely are sets of items cracked? For capturing the prior knowledge of the hacker, we propose a belief function , which amounts to an educated guess of the frequency of each item. For various classes of belief functions which correspond to different degrees of prior knowledge, we derive formulas for computing the expected number of cracks of single items and for itemsets, the probability of cracking the itemsets. While obtaining, exact values for more general situations is computationally hard, we propose a series of heuristics called the O-estimates . They are easy to compute and are shown fairly accurate, justified by empirical results on real benchmark datasets. Based on the O-estimates, we propose a recipe for the decision makers to resolve their dilemma. Our recipe operates at two different levels, depending on whether the data owner wants to reason in terms of single items or sets of items (or both). Finally, we present techniques for ascertaining a hacker's knowledge of correlation in terms of co-occurrence of items likely. This information regarding the hacker's knowledge can be incorporated into our framework of disclosure risk analysis and we present experimental results demonstrating how this knowledge affects the heuristic estimates we have developed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.028 | 0.167 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".