Differentially private frequent episode mining over event streams

Abstract

Frequent episode mining is a wide range framework of data mining from sequential data with many applications, which is a totally short-ordered collection of event-types and unearths temporal correlations without information loss over event streams. While offering substantial benefits, directly releasing frequent episodes to the public will enormously threaten the individual’s privacy. However, there is little work so far concentrating on privately frequent episode mining. In this paper, we investigate the privacy problem in mining frequent episodes from event streams due to continuous releases in successive windows and propose a real-time differentially private frequent episode mining algorithm over event streams to avoid the privacy leakage with ω-event privacy guarantee. To obtain private frequent episodes, we propose a sample-based perturbation approach, which improves the accuracy of selecting frequent episodes based on sampling databases. To reduce the privately mining time and avoid repeatedly privacy budget allocation to coincident window of adjacent releases as much as possible, we present an incremental perturbation approach according to the judgment in dissimilarity calculation mechanism. Meanwhile, in order to protect data collected from any ω successive timestamps over event streams, we employ an adaptive ω-event privacy mechanism on the basis of the dynamicity of episodes. Finally, experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm.