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Privacy preserving data visualizations

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Demetris AvraamORCiD, Dr Becca Wilson, Dr Olly Butters, Tom Burton, Emeritus Professor Paul BurtonORCiD

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).


Abstract

© 2020, The Author(s). Data visualizations are a valuable tool used during both statistical analysis and the interpretation of results as they graphically reveal useful information about the structure, properties and relationships between variables, which may otherwise be concealed in tabulated data. In disciplines like medicine and the social sciences, where collected data include sensitive information about study participants, the sharing and publication of individual-level records is controlled by data protection laws and ethico-legal norms. Thus, as data visualizations – such as graphs and plots – may be linked to other released information and used to identify study participants and their personal attributes, their creation is often prohibited by the terms of data use. These restrictions are enforced to reduce the risk of breaching data subject confidentiality, however they limit analysts from displaying useful descriptive plots for their research features and findings. Here we propose the use of anonymization techniques to generate privacy-preserving visualizations that retain the statistical properties of the underlying data while still adhering to strict data disclosure rules. We demonstrate the use of (i) the well-known k-anonymization process which preserves privacy by reducing the granularity of the data using suppression and generalization, (ii) a novel deterministic approach that replaces individual-level observations with the centroids of each k nearest neighbours, and (iii) a probabilistic procedure that perturbs individual attributes with the addition of random stochastic noise. We apply the proposed methods to generate privacy-preserving data visualizations for exploratory data analysis and inferential regression plot diagnostics, and we discuss their strengths and limitations.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Avraam D, Wilson R, Butters O, Burton T, Nicolaides C, Jones E, Boyd A, Burton P

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: EPJ Data Science

Year: 2021

Volume: 10

Issue: 1

Online publication date: 01/07/2021

Acceptance date: 10/12/2020

Date deposited: 26/07/2021

ISSN (electronic): 2193-1127

Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH

URL: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-020-00257-4

DOI: 10.1140/epjds/s13688-020-00257-4


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Funding

Funder referenceFunder name
102215
108439/Z/15/Z
824989European Commission (Research Directorate General, Research Infrastructures)
874583
786247
MR/S003959/1Medical Research Council (MRC)
MC_PC_17210
MR/N01104X/1
MR/N01104X/2Medical Research Council (MRC)
RES/0150/7943/202

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