Clustering and analyzing on collected data can improve user experiences and quality of services in big data, IoT applications. However, directly releasing original data brings potential privacy concerns, which raises challenges and opportunities for privacy-preserving clustering. In this paper, we study the problem of non-interactive clustering in distributed setting under the framework of local differential privacy. We first extend the Bit Vector, a novel anonymization mechanism to be functionality-capable and privacy-preserving. Based on the modified encoding mechanism, we propose kCluster algorithm that can be used for clustering in the anonymized space. We show the modified encoding mechanism can be easily implemented in existing clustering algorithms that only rely on distance information, such as DBSCAN. Theoretical analysis and experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.
This paper explores the possibility of using multiplicative random projection matrices for privacy preserving distributed data mining. It specifically considers the problem of computing statistical aggregates like the inner product matrix, correlation coefficient matrix, and Euclidean distance matrix from distributed privacy sensitive data possibly owned by multiple parties. This class of problems is directly related to many other data-mining problems such as clustering, principal component analysis, and classification. This paper makes primary contributions on two different grounds. First, it explores independent component analysis as a possible tool for breaching privacy in deterministic multiplicative perturbation-based models such as random orthogonal transformation and random rotation. Then, it proposes an approximate random projection-based technique to improve the level of privacy protection while still preserving certain statistical characteristics of the data. The paper presents extensive theoretical analysis and experimental results. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed technique is effective and can be successfully used for different types of privacy-preserving data mining applications. Despite its benefit in a wide range of applications, data mining techniques also have raised a number of ethical issues. Some such issues include those of privacy, data security, intellectual property rights, and many others. In this paper, we address the privacy problem against unauthorized secondary use of information. To do so, we introduce a family of geometric data transformation methods (GDTMs) which ensure that the mining process will not violate privacy up to a certain degree of security. We focus primarily on privacy preserving data clustering, notably on partition-based and hierarchical methods. Our proposed methods distort only confidential numerical attributes to meet privacy requirements, while preserving general features for clustering analysis. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods are effective and provide acceptable values in practice for balancing privacy and accuracy. We report the main results of our performance evaluation and discuss some open research issues.