Association rule hiding for privacy preserving data mining

Abstract

Privacy preservation is a big challenge in data mining. The protection of sensitive information becomes a critical issue when releasing data to outside parties. Association rule mining could be very useful in such situations. It could be used to identify all the possible ways by which ‘non-confidential’ data can reveal ‘confidential’ data, which is commonly known as ‘inference problem’. This issue is solved using Association Rule Hiding (ARH) techniques in Privacy Preserving Data Mining (PPDM). Association rule hiding aims to conceal these association rules so that no sensitive information can be mined from the database. This paper proposes a model for hiding sensitive association rules. The model is implemented with a Fast Hiding Sensitive Association Rule (FHSAR) algorithm using the java eclipse framework. The implemented algorithm is integrated with a Weka open source data mining tool. Model analysis and evaluation shows its efficiency by balancing the trade-off between utility and privacy preservation in data mining with minimal side effects.