Speeding up clustering-based k-anonymisation algorithms with pre-partitioning

K-anonymisation is a technique for protecting privacy contained within a dataset. Many k-anonymisation algorithms have been proposed, and one class of such algorithms are clustering-based. These algorithms can offer high quality solutions, but are rather inefficient to execute. In this paper, we propose a method that partitions a dataset into groups first and then clusters the data within each group for k-anonymisation. Our experiments show that combining partitioning with clustering can improve the performance of clustering-based k-anonymisation algorithms significantly while maintaining the quality of anonymisations they produce