Along with the rapid development of the Internet technology, social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly emerging. As various types of datasets are easily exposed to the network, privacy security in SNS becomes the focus of the study. Anonymization techniques, such as generalization and bucketization, and data perturbation techniques are usually employed in data publishing for privacy protection. However, in the meanwhile, the privacy protection methods reduce the utility of the data. Thus, the issue of privacy-utility trade-off becomes one very real problem. By considering the privacy-utility trade-off and combining the minimum spanning tree (MST) clustering technique and the sub-graph generalization technique, a privacy protection model is proposed for data publishing in weighted social networks. The MST-based clustering method is one representative and concise graph-based clustering algorithm. Meanwhile, as one MST of an edge-weighted graph is the minimum weight spanning tree, some important properties of the graph like the shortest path are preserved in the MST. Finally, on the basis of sub-graphs (clusters) divided by the MST-clustering, three sub-graph generalization approaches are designed in one reasonable way for data publishing to guarantee the privacy-utility trade-off of the proposed method. Experiments and result analysis indicate workability of the proposed method that the proposed model offers privacy protection for the data publishing by means of the sub-graph generalization approach while it can also improve the data utility especially for occasions like data mining, machine learning, and pattern recognition.
