ABSTRACT

Spatial anonymization of address points is critical to fields such as public health. There have been recent concerns about applications of geomasks that did not guarantee the level of k-anonymity theoretically expected. An analysis of the problem and a potential solution were previously proposed: Adaptive Areal Elimination (AAE). The present paper expands on AAE and proposes a modified version, Adaptive Areal Masking (AAM). A benchmark comparison of both methods is conducted, which shows that AAM outperforms AAE in most configurations tested. The discussion attempts to identify the application cases for which AAE might still be preferable and addresses documentation needs with both methods.

摘要

地址点的空间匿名化对于公共卫生等领域至关重要。近年来，人们一直担心地掩膜的应用不能保证理论上预期的k-匿名性。先前已经提出了对该问题的分析和可能的解决方案：自适应地域消除（AAE）。本文在AAE的基础上进行了扩展，并提出了一种改进版本，即自适应区域屏蔽（AAM）。对这两种方法进行了基准比较，结果表明，在大多数测试配置中，AAM均优于AAE。讨论试图确定仍适合使用AAE的应用案例，并通过两种方法解决文档需求。