Privacy preserving clustering

Abstract

The freedom and transparency of information flow on the Internet has heightened concerns of privacy. Given a set of data items, clustering algorithms group similar items together. Clustering has many applications, such as customer-behavior analysis, targeted marketing, forensics, and bioinformatics. In this paper, we present the design and analysis of a privacy-preserving k-means clustering algorithm, where only the cluster means at the various steps of the algorithm are revealed to the participating parties. The crucial step in our privacy-preserving k-means is privacy-preserving computation of cluster means. We present two protocols (one based on oblivious polynomial evaluation and the second based on homomorphic encryption) for privacy-preserving computation of cluster means. We have a JAVA implementation of our algorithm. Using our implementation, we have performed a thorough evaluation of our privacy-preserving clustering algorithm on three data sets. Our evaluation demonstrates that privacy-preserving clustering is feasible, i.e., our homomorphic-encryption based algorithm finished clustering a large data set in approximately 66 seconds. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.