A Survey of Privacy-Preserving Methods Across Vertically Partitioned Data

Abstract

The goal of data mining is to extract or “mine” knowledge from large amounts of data. However, data is often collected by several different sites. Privacy, legal and commercial concerns restrict centralized access to this data, thus derailing data mining projects. Recently, there has been growing focus on finding solutions to this problem. Several algorithms have been proposed that do distributed knowledge discovery, while providing guarantees on the non-disclosure of data. Vertical partitioning of data is an important data distribution model often found in real life. Vertical partitioning or heterogeneous distribution implies that different features of the same set of data are collected by different sites. In this chapter we survey some of the methods developed in the literature to mine vertically partitioned data without violating privacy and discuss challenges and complexities specific to vertical partitioning.