VIDPSO: Victim item deletion based PSO inspired sensitive pattern hiding algorithm for dense datasets

Abstract

Collaborative frequent itemset mining involves analyzing the data shared from multiple business entities to find interesting patterns from it. However, this comes at the cost of high privacy risk. Because some of these patterns may contain business-sensitive information and hence are denoted as sensitive patterns. The revelation of such patterns can disclose confidential information. Privacy-preserving data mining (PPDM) includes various sensitive pattern hiding (SPH) techniques, which ensures that sensitive patterns do not get revealed when data mining models are applied on shared datasets. In the process of hiding sensitive patterns, some of the non-sensitive patterns also become infrequent. SPH techniques thus affect the results of data mining models. Maintaining a balance between data privacy and data utility is an NP-hard problem because it requires the selection of sensitive items for deletion and also the selection of transactions containing these items such that side effects of deletion are minimal. There are various algorithms proposed by researchers that use evolutionary approaches such as genetic algorithm(GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO) and ant colony optimization (ACO). These evolutionary SPH algorithms mask sensitive patterns through the deletion of sensitive transactions. Failure in the sensitive patterns masking and loss of data have been the biggest challenges for such algorithms. The performance of evolutionary algorithms further gets degraded when applied on dense datasets. In this research paper, victim item deletion based PSO inspired evolutionary algorithm named VIDPSO is proposed to sanitize the dense datasets. In the proposed algorithm, each particle of the population consists of n number of sub-particles derived from pre-calculated victim items. The proposed algorithm has a high exploration capability to search the solution space for selecting optimal transactions. Experiments conducted on real and synthetic dense datasets depict that VIDPSO algorithm performs better vis-a-vis GA, PSO and ACO based SPH algorithms in terms of hiding failure with minimal loss of data.