TY - GEN
T1 - The complexity of degree anonymization by graph contractions
AU - Hartung, Sepp
AU - Talmon, Nimrod
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.
PY - 2015/1/1
Y1 - 2015/1/1
N2 - We study the computational complexity of k-anonymizing a given graph by as few graph contractions as possible. A graph is said to be k-anonymous if for every vertex in it, there are at least k − 1 other vertices with exactly the same degree. The general degree anonymization problem is motivated by applications in privacy-preserving data publishing, and was studied to some extent for various graph operations (most notable operations being edge addition, edge deletion, vertex addition, and vertex deletion). We complement this line of research by studying several variants of graph contractions, which are operations of interest, for example, in the contexts of social networks and clustering algorithms. We show that the problem of degree anonymization by graph contractions is NP-hard even for some very restricted inputs, and identify some fixed-parameter tractable cases.
AB - We study the computational complexity of k-anonymizing a given graph by as few graph contractions as possible. A graph is said to be k-anonymous if for every vertex in it, there are at least k − 1 other vertices with exactly the same degree. The general degree anonymization problem is motivated by applications in privacy-preserving data publishing, and was studied to some extent for various graph operations (most notable operations being edge addition, edge deletion, vertex addition, and vertex deletion). We complement this line of research by studying several variants of graph contractions, which are operations of interest, for example, in the contexts of social networks and clustering algorithms. We show that the problem of degree anonymization by graph contractions is NP-hard even for some very restricted inputs, and identify some fixed-parameter tractable cases.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84929648640&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17142-5_23
DO - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17142-5_23
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 260
EP - 271
BT - Theory and Applications of Models of Computation - 12th Annual Conference, TAMC 2015, Proceedings
A2 - Jain, Rahul
A2 - Jain, Sanjay
A2 - Stephan, Frank
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 12th Annual Conference on Theory and Applications of Models of Computation, TAMC 2015
Y2 - 18 May 2015 through 20 May 2015
ER -