Advances in data collection and storage technologies have given way to the establishment of transactional databases among companies and organizations, as they allow enormous amounts of data to be stored efficiently. Useful knowledge can be mined from these data, which can be used in several ways depending on the nature of the data. Quite often companies and organizations are willing to share data for the sake of mutual benefit. However, the sharing of such data comes with risks, as problems with privacy may arise. Sensitive data, along with sensitive knowledge inferred from this data, must be protected from unintentional exposure to unauthorized parties. One form of the inferred knowledge is frequent patterns mined in the form of frequent itemsets from transactional databases. The problem of protecting such patterns from being discovered, is known as the frequent itemset hiding problem. In this paper we present a toolbox, which provides several implementations of frequent itemset hiding algorithms. Firstly, we summarize the most important aspects of each algorithm. We then introduce the architecture of the toolbox and its novel features. Finally, we provide experimental results on real world datasets, demonstrating the capabilities of the toolbox and the convenience it offers in comparing different algorithms.
@cite_26 and @cite_12 present another approach, according to which either ones or zeros are replaced by @math ? @math (question marks), implying unknown values, so that the hiding is achieved not by falsifying, but by fuzzifying the data. Oliveira and Za " i ane @cite_19 @cite_23 propose a technique for hiding multiple association rules simultaneously that requires only one pass over the whole database, regardless the size of the database.
@cite_19 @cite_26 @cite_23 @cite_12
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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. Data mining technology has given us new capabilities to identify correlations in large data sets. This introduces risks when the data is to be made public, but the correlations are private. We introduce a method for selectively removing individual values from a database to prevent the discovery of a set of rules, while preserving the data for other applications. The efficacy and complexity of this method are discussed. We also present an experiment showing an example of this methodology. We address the problem of protecting some sensitive knowledge in transactional databases. The challenge is on protecting actionable knowledge for strategic decisions, but at the same time not losing the great benefit of association rule mining. To accomplish that, we introduce a new, efficient one-scan algorithm that meets privacy protection and accuracy in association rule mining, without putting at risk the effectiveness of the data mining per se. Data mining provides the opportunity to extract useful information from large databases. Various techniques have been proposed in this context in order to extract this information in the most efficient way. However, efficiency is not our only concern in this study. The security and privacy issues over the extracted knowledge must be seriously considered as well. By taking this into consideration, we study the procedure of hiding sensitive association rules in binary data sets by blocking some data values and we present an algorithm for solving this problem. We also provide a fuzzification of the support and the confidence of an association rule in order to accommodate for the existence of blocked unknown values. In addition, we quantitatively compare the proposed algorithm with other already published algorithms by running experiments on binary data sets, and we also qualitatively compare the efficiency of the proposed algorithm in hiding association rules. We utilize the notion of border rules, by putting weights in each rule, and we use effective data structures for the representation of the rules so as (a) to minimize the side effects created by the hiding process and (b) to speed up the selection of the victim transactions. Finally, we study the overall security of the modified database, using the C4.5 decision tree algorithm of the WEKA data mining tool, and we discuss the advantages and the limitations of blocking.