Distortion-based heuristic method for sensitive association rule hiding

Abstract

In the past few years, privacy issues in data mining have received considerable attention in the data mining literature. However, the problem of data security cannot simply be solved by restricting data collection or against unauthorized access, it should be dealt with by providing solutions that not only protect sensitive information, but also not affect to the accuracy of the results in data mining and not violate the sensitive knowledge related with individual privacy or competitive advantage in businesses. Sensitive association rule hiding is an important issue in privacy preserving data mining. The aim of association rule hiding is to minimize the side effects on the sanitized database, which means to reduce the number of missing non-sensitive rules and the number of generated ghost rules. Current methods for hiding sensitive rules cause side effects and data loss. In this paper, we introduce a new distortion-based method to hide sensitive rules. This method proposes the determination of critical transactions based on the number of non-sensitive maximal frequent itemsets that contain at least one item to the consequent of the sensitive rule, they can be directly affected by the modified transactions. Using this set, the number of non-sensitive itemsets that need to be considered is reduced dramatically. We compute the smallest number of transactions for modification in advance to minimize the damage to the database. Comparative experimental results on real datasets showed that the proposed method can achieve better results than other methods with fewer side effects and data loss.