Abstract
Motivated by a strongly growing interest in graph anonymization in the data mining and databases communities, we study the NP-hard problem of making a graph k-anonymous by adding as few edges as possible. Herein, a graph is k-anonymous if for every vertex in the graph there are at least k − 1 other vertices of the same degree. Our algorithmic results shed light on the performance quality of a popular heuristic due to Liu and Terzi [ACM SIGMOD 2008]; in particular, we show that the heuristic provides optimal solutions in case that many edges need to be added. Based on this, we develop a polynomial-time data reduction, yielding a polynomial-size problem kernel for the problem parameterized by the maximum vertex degree. This result is in a sense tight since we also show that the problem is already NP-hard for H-index three, implying NP-hardness for smaller parameters such as average degree and degeneracy.
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Hartung, S., Nichterlein, A., Niedermeier, R., Suchý, O. (2013). A Refined Complexity Analysis of Degree Anonymization in Graphs. In: Fomin, F.V., Freivalds, R., Kwiatkowska, M., Peleg, D. (eds) Automata, Languages, and Programming. ICALP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7966. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39212-2_52
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