A Multi-Threshold Ant Colony System-based Sanitization Model in Shared Medical Environments

During the past several years, revealing some useful knowledge or protecting individual's private information in an identifiable health dataset (i.e., within an Electronic Health Record) has become a tradeoff issue. Especially in this era of a global pandemic, security and privacy are often overlooked in lieu of usability. Privacy preserving data mining (PPDM) is definitely going to be have an important role to resolve this problem. Nevertheless, the scenario of mining information in an identifiable health dataset holds high complexity compared to traditional PPDM problems. Leaking individual private information in an identifiable health dataset has becomes a serious legal issue. In this article, the proposed Ant Colony System to Data Mining algorithm takes the multi-threshold constraint to secure and sanitize patents' records in different lengths, which is applicable in a real medical situation. The experimental results show the proposed algorithm not only has the ability to hide all sensitive information but also to keep useful knowledge for mining usage in the sanitized database.