Association Rule Hiding in Privacy Preserving Data Mining

This article describes how privacy preserving data mining has become one of the most important and interesting research directions in data mining. With the help of data mining techniques, people can extract hidden information and discover patterns and relationships between the data items. In most of the situations, the extracted knowledge contains sensitive information about individuals and organizations. Moreover, this sensitive information can be misused for various purposes which violate the individual's privacy. Association rules frequently predetermine significant target marketing information about a business. Significant association rules provide knowledge to the data miner as they effectively summarize the data, while uncovering any hidden relations among items that hold in the data. Association rule hiding techniques are used for protecting the knowledge extracted by the sensitive association rules during the process of association rule mining. Association rule hiding refers to the process of modifying the original database in such a way that certain sensitive association rules disappear without seriously affecting the data and the non-sensitive rules. In this article, two new hiding techniques are proposed namely hiding technique based on genetic algorithm (HGA) and dummy items creation (DIC) technique. Hiding technique based on genetic algorithm is used for hiding sensitive association rules and the dummy items creation technique hides the sensitive rules as well as it creates dummy items for the modified sensitive items. Experimental results show the performance of the proposed techniques.