Efficient algorithms for victim item selection in privacy-preserving utility mining

Abstract

High-utility itemset mining has evolved as an essential and captivating research topic. It aims to extract the patterns/itemsets having high utility value; hence, they are called high utility itemsets (HUIs). From a business perspective, a utility can be the benefit associated with the sale of a particular item or the usefulness or satisfaction that a customer experiences from a product. The economic utilities are helpful to evaluate the drivers behind a customer’s purchase decision. The advances in information technology have enabled us to access the datasets related to various domains like health care, stock market, market-basket, education and bioinformatics. Companies strive to increase the utility value of their products and share their customer’s transactions data to extract high utility patterns to achieve global customer insights. However, this can lead to massive security and privacy risk if their competitors misuse the patterns that can disclose their confidential information. Privacy-preserving utility mining (PPUM) is a branch of privacy-preserving data mining (PPDM) that presents various algorithms which intend to hide sensitive high utility itemsets (SHUIs) and maintain a balance between utility-maximizing and privacy-preserving. In this paper, two SHUIs hiding algorithms, MinMax and Weighted, are proposed with three variants of each algorithm. Experiments on various datasets show that proposed algorithms perform better than the existing SHUIs hiding algorithms as fewer distortions of non-sensitive knowledge occur. This study uses six performance evaluating metrics to assess the proposed algorithms against compared algorithms.