Vicenç Torra

Anonymization and data masking have effects on data-driven models. Different anonymization methods have been developed to provide a good trade-off between privacy guarantees and data utility. Nevertheless, the effects of data protection (e.g., data microaggregation and noise addition) on data integration and on data-driven models (e.g., machine learning models) built from these data are not known. In this paper, we study how data protection affects data integration, and the corresponding effects on the results of machine learning models built from the outcome of the data integration process. The experimental results show that the levels of protection that prevent proper database integration do not affect machine learning models that learn from the integrated database to the same degree. Concretely, our preliminary analysis and experiments show that data protection techniques have a lower level of impact on data integration than on machine learning models.