PA-FRIM: An Adaptive Hybrid FOX–RUN Framework with Adaptive Intensive Mutation for Multi-Metric Big Data Anonymization

Background/Objectives: Privacy preservation in big data environments is an NP-hard optimization task that requires the satisfaction of k-anonymity and l-diversity constraints to ensure data utility. Methods: This study proposes a novel hybrid optimization approach, adaptive hybrid FOX–RUN Intensive Mutation (PA-FRIM), to address the privacy–utility trade-off in anonymization process. The proposed approach integrates FOX-based global exploration with RUN-based local search using a hybrid adaptive control strategy and intensive mutation search to improve solution diversity in highly constrained solution spaces. Results: The experimental study on the Adult and Bank Marketing datasets shows that PA-FRIM exhibits stable convergence behavior compared to competing methods. The results indicate that full privacy is achieved on the Adult dataset with a violation value of 0.00, and information loss is minimized with an NIL measure of 0.5686. From the analytical utility perspective, PA-FRIM ensures data usability, even in the constrained region, achieving classification accuracies of 89.61% on the Bank Marketing dataset and 84.90% on the Adult dataset. Conclusions: By using a multi-metric evaluation strategy, PA-FRIM provides a robust optimization framework that eliminates privacy violations while maintaining high analytical performance.