Recently big data and its applications had sharp growth in various fields such as IoT, bioinformatics, eCommerce, and social media. The huge volume of data incurred enormous challenges to the architecture, infrastructure, and computing capacity of IT systems. Therefore, the compelling need of the scientific and industrial community is large-scale and robust computing systems. Since one of the characteristics of big data is value, data should be published for analysts to extract useful patterns from them. However, data publishing may lead to the disclosure of individuals’ private information. Among the modern parallel computing platforms, Apache Spark is a fast and in-memory computing framework for large-scale data processing that provides high scalability by introducing the resilient distributed dataset (RDDs). In terms of performance, Due to in-memory computations, it is 100 times faster than Hadoop. Therefore, Apache Spark is one of the essential frameworks to implement distributed methods for privacy-preserving in big data publishing (PPBDP). This paper uses the RDD programming of Apache Spark to propose an efficient parallel implementation of a new computing model for big data anonymization. This computing model has three-phase of in-memory computations to address the runtime, scalability, and performance of large-scale data anonymization. The model supports partition-based data clustering algorithms to preserve the λ-diversity privacy model by using transformation and actions on RDDs. Therefore, the authors have investigated Spark-based implementation for preserving the λ-diversity privacy model by two designed City block and Pearson distance functions. The results of the paper provide a comprehensive guideline allowing the researchers to apply Apache Spark in their own researches.

Recently big data and its applications had sharp growth in various fields such as IoT, bioinformatics, eCommerce, and social media. The huge volume of data incurred enormous challenges to the architecture, infrastructure, and computing capacity of IT systems. Therefore, the compelling need of the scientific and industrial community is large-scale and robust computing systems. Since one of the characteristics of big data is value, data should be published for analysts to extract useful patterns from them. However, data publishing may lead to the disclosure of individuals’ private information. Among the modern parallel computing platforms, Apache Spark is a fast and in-memory computing framework for large-scale data processing that provides high scalability by introducing the resilient distributed dataset (RDDs). In terms of performance, Due to in-memory computations, it is 100 times faster than Hadoop. Therefore, Apache Spark is one of the essential frameworks to implement distributed methods for privacy-preserving in big data publishing (PPBDP). This paper uses the RDD programming of Apache Spark to propose an efficient parallel implementation of a new computing model for big data anonymization. This computing model has three-phase of in-memory computations to address the runtime, scalability, and performance of large-scale data anonymization. The model supports partition-based data clustering algorithms to preserve the λ-diversity privacy model by using transformation and actions on RDDs. Therefore, the authors have investigated Spark-based implementation for preserving the λ-diversity privacy model by two designed City block and Pearson distance functions. The results of the paper provide a comprehensive guideline allowing the researchers to apply Apache Spark in their own researches.

pone.0285212.t005 - A distributed computing model for big data anonymization in the networks

Synthetic data generating parameters. The table summarizes the generating parameters for synthetic networks showing the corresponding symbol, name and range after the application of the constraints in Section e.2.

Classification performances for the Breast Cancer Wisconsin dataset. Performance indices are extracted by the confusion matrix obtained comparing the original ground truth and the labels of the Fiedler vector.

ANOVA results for the distributions in Fig 8. Four different one-way ANOVA for each combination of and in the toy example #2. The corresponding p and F values are shown in this table.

Classification performances for the rice dataset. Performance indices are extracted by the confusion matrix obtained comparing the original ground truth and the labels of the Fiedler vector.

F1-measure criterion on the anonymous poker hand for λ = 4, ḱ = 3 and different values of k.

The partitions variables used in this paper.

Accuracy criterion on the anonymous poker hand for λ = 4, ḱ = 3 and different values of k.