Full-Exact Approach for Frequent Itemset Hiding

This paper proposes a novel exact approach that relies on integer programming for association rule hiding. A large panorama of solutions exists for the complex problem of itemset hiding: from practical heuristic approaches to more accurate exact approaches. Exact approaches provide better solutions while suffering from the lack of performance and existing exact approaches still augment their methods with heuristics to make the problem solvable. In this case, the solution may not be optimum. This work presents a full-exact method, without any need for heuristics. Extensive tests are conducted on 10 real datasets to analyze distance and information loss performances of the algorithm in comparison to a former similar algorithm. Since the approach provides the optimum solution to the problem, it should be considered as a reference method.