Efficient association rules hiding using genetic algorithms

Abstract

In today's world, millions of transactions are connected to online businesses, and the main challenging task is ensuring the privacy of sensitive information. Sensitive association rules hiding (SARH) is an important goal of privacy protection algorithms. Various approaches and algorithms have been developed for sensitive association rules hiding, differentiated according to their hiding performance through utility preservation, prevention of ghost rules, and computational complexity. A meta-heuristic algorithm is a good candidate to solve the problem of SARH due to its selective and parallel search behavior, avoiding local minima capability. This paper proposes simple genetic encoding for SARH. The proposed algorithm formulates an objective function that estimates the effect on nonsensitive rules and offers recursive computation to reduce them. Three benchmark datasets were used for evaluation. The results show an improvement of 81% in execution time, 23% in utility, and 5% in accuracy.