Algorithms for balancing privacy and knowledge discovery in association rule mining

Abstract

The discovery of association rules from large databases has proven beneficial for companies since such rules can be very effective in revealing actionable knowledge that leads to strategic decisions. In tandem with this benefit, association rule mining can also pose a threat to privacy protection. The main problem is that from non-sensitive information or unclassified data, one is able to infer sensitive information, including personal information, facts, or even patterns that are not supposed to be disclosed. This scenario reveals a pressing need for techniques that ensure privacy protection, while facilitating proper information accuracy and mining. In this paper, we introduce new algorithms for balancing privacy and knowledge discovery in association rule mining. We show that our algorithms require only two scans, regardless of the database size and the number of restrictive association rules that must be protected. Our performance study compares the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed algorithms and analyzes the fraction of association rules, which are preserved after sanitizing a database. We also report the main results of our performance evaluation and discuss some open research issues.