We examine Euclidean distance-preserving data perturbation as a tool for privacy-preserving data mining. Such perturbations allow many important data mining algorithms e.g. hierarchical and k-means clustering), with only minor modification, to be applied to the perturbed data and produce exactly the same results as if applied to the original data. However, the issue of how well the privacy of the original data is preserved needs careful study. We engage in this study by assuming the role of an attacker armed with a small set of known original data tuples (inputs). Little work has been done examining this kind of attack when the number of known original tuples is less than the number of data dimensions. We focus on this important case, develop and rigorously analyze an attack that utilizes any number of known original tuples. The approach allows the attacker to estimate the original data tuple associated with each perturbed tuple and calculate the probability that the estimation results in a privacy breach. On a real 16-dimensional dataset, we show that the attacker, with 4 known original tuples, can estimate an original unknown tuple with less than 7 error with probability exceeding 0.8.
Evfimievski @cite_11 , Rizvi and Haritza @cite_8 considered the use of categorical data perturbation in the context of association rule mining. Their algorithms delete real items and add bogus items to the original records. Association rules present in the original data can be estimated from the perturbed data. Along a related line, Verykios @cite_28 considered perturbation techniques which allow the discovery of some association rules while hiding others considered to be sensitive.
@cite_28 @cite_8 @cite_11
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Large repositories of data contain sensitive information that must be protected against unauthorized access. The protection of the confidentiality of this information has been a long-term goal for the database security research community and for the government statistical agencies. Recent advances in data mining and machine learning algorithms have increased the disclosure risks that one may encounter when releasing data to outside parties. A key problem, and still not sufficiently investigated, is the need to balance the confidentiality of the disclosed data with the legitimate needs of the data users. Every disclosure limitation method affects, in some way, and modifies true data values and relationships. We investigate confidentiality issues of a broad category of rules, the association rules. In particular, we present three strategies and five algorithms for hiding a group of association rules, which is characterized as sensitive. One rule is characterized as sensitive if its disclosure risk is above a certain privacy threshold. Sometimes, sensitive rules should not be disclosed to the public since, among other things, they may be used for inferring sensitive data, or they may provide business competitors with an advantage. We also perform an evaluation study of the hiding algorithms in order to analyze their time complexity and the impact that they have in the original database. Data mining services require accurate input data for their results to be meaningful, but privacy concerns may influence users to provide spurious information. We investigate here, with respect to mining association rules, whether users can be encouraged to provide correct information by ensuring that the mining process cannot, with any reasonable degree of certainty, violate their privacy. We present a scheme, based on probabilistic distortion of user data, that can simultaneously provide a high degree of privacy to the user and retain a high level of accuracy in the mining results. The performance of the scheme is validated against representative real and synthetic datasets. There has been increasing interest in the problem of building accurate data mining models over aggregate data, while protecting privacy at the level of individual records. One approach for this problem is to randomize the values in individual records, and only disclose the randomized values. The model is then built over the randomized data, after first compensating for the randomization (at the aggregate level). This approach is potentially vulnerable to privacy breaches: based on the distribution of the data, one may be able to learn with high confidence that some of the randomized records satisfy a specified property, even though privacy is preserved on average.In this paper, we present a new formulation of privacy breaches, together with a methodology, "amplification", for limiting them. Unlike earlier approaches, amplification makes it is possible to guarantee limits on privacy breaches without any knowledge of the distribution of the original data. We instantiate this methodology for the problem of mining association rules, and modify the algorithm from [9] to limit privacy breaches without knowledge of the data distribution. Next, we address the problem that the amount of randomization required to avoid privacy breaches (when mining association rules) results in very long transactions. By using pseudorandom generators and carefully choosing seeds such that the desired items from the original transaction are present in the randomized transaction, we can send just the seed instead of the transaction, resulting in a dramatic drop in communication and storage cost. Finally, we define new information measures that take privacy breaches into account when quantifying the amount of privacy preserved by randomization.