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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Demetris AvraamORCiD, Emeritus Professor Paul BurtonORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2022, The Author(s). Background: Data privacy is one of the biggest challenges for any organisation which processes personal data, especially in the area of medical research where data include sensitive information about patients and study participants. Sharing of data is therefore problematic, which is at odds with the principle of open data that is so important to the advancement of society and science. Several statistical methods and computational tools have been developed to help data custodians and analysts overcome this challenge. Methods: In this paper, we propose a new deterministic approach for anonymising personal data. The method stratifies the underlying data by the categorical variables and re-distributes the continuous variables through a k nearest neighbours based algorithm. Results: We demonstrate the use of the deterministic anonymisation on real data, including data from a sample of Titanic passengers, and data from participants in the 1958 Birth Cohort. Conclusions: The proposed procedure makes data re-identification difficult while minimising the loss of utility (by preserving the spatial properties of the underlying data); the latter means that informative statistical analysis can still be conducted.
Author(s): Avraam D, Jones E, Burton P
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
Year: 2022
Volume: 22
Issue: 1
Online publication date: 28/01/2022
Acceptance date: 09/01/2022
Date deposited: 23/06/2022
ISSN (electronic): 1472-6947
Publisher: BioMed Central Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-022-01754-4
DOI: 10.1186/s12911-022-01754-4
PubMed id: 35090447
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