The Possibility of Matrix Decomposition as Anonymization and Evaluation for Time-sequence Data

Time-sequence data is high dimensional and con- tains a lot of information, which can be utilized in various fields, such as insurance, finance, and advertising. Personal data including time-sequence data is often converted to anonymized datasets, which need to strike a balance between both privacy and utility. In this paper, we consider low-rank matrix decomposition as one of the anonymization methods and evaluate its efficiency. We convert time-sequence datasets to matrices and evaluate both privacy and utility. The record IDs in time-sequence data are changed at regular intervals to reduce re-identification risk. However, since individuals tend to behave in a similar fashion over periods of time, there remains a risk of record linkage even if record IDs are different. Hence, we evaluate the re- identification and linkage risks as privacy risks of time-sequence data. Our experimental results show that matrix decomposition is a viable anonymization method and it can achieve better utility than existing anonymization methods.