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Minimizing Information Loss and Preserving Privacy

Author

Listed:
  • Syam Menon

    (School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75083)

  • Sumit Sarkar

    (School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75083)

Abstract

The need to hide sensitive information before sharing databases has long been recognized. In the context of data mining, sensitive information often takes the form of itemsets that need to be suppressed before the data is released. This paper considers the problem of minimizing the number of nonsensitive itemsets lost while concealing sensitive ones. It is shown to be an intractably large version of an NP-hard problem. Consequently, a two-phased procedure that involves the solution of two smaller NP-hard problems is proposed as a practical and effective alternative. In the first phase, a procedure to solve a sanitization problem identifies how the support for sensitive itemsets could be eliminated from a specific transaction by removing the fewest number of items from it. This leads to a modified frequent itemset hiding problem, where transactions to be sanitized are selected such that the number of nonsensitive itemsets lost, while concealing sensitive ones, is minimized. Heuristic procedures are developed for these problems using intuition derived from their integer programming formulations. Results from computational experiments conducted on a publicly available retail data set and three large data sets generated using IBM's synthetic data generator indicate that these approaches are very effective, solving problems involving up to 10 million transactions in a short period of time. The results also show that the process of sanitization has considerable bearing on the quality of solutions obtained.

Suggested Citation

  • Syam Menon & Sumit Sarkar, 2007. "Minimizing Information Loss and Preserving Privacy," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 53(1), pages 101-116, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:53:y:2007:i:1:p:101-116
    DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.1060.0603
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Sumit Dutta Chowdhury & George T. Duncan & Ramayya Krishnan & Stephen F. Roehrig & Sumitra Mukherjee, 1999. "Disclosure Detection in Multivariate Categorical Databases: Auditing Confidentiality Protection Through Two New Matrix Operators," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 45(12), pages 1710-1723, December.
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    4. Robert Garfinkel & Ram Gopal & Paulo Goes, 2002. "Privacy Protection of Binary Confidential Data Against Deterministic, Stochastic, and Insider Threat," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 48(6), pages 749-764, June.
    5. Syam Menon & Sumit Sarkar & Shibnath Mukherjee, 2005. "Maximizing Accuracy of Shared Databases when Concealing Sensitive Patterns," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 16(3), pages 256-270, September.
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Peng Cheng & Chun-Wei Lin & Jeng-Shyang Pan, 2015. "Use HypE to Hide Association Rules by Adding Items," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(6), pages 1-19, June.
    2. Syam Menon & Abhijeet Ghoshal & Sumit Sarkar, 2022. "Modifying Transactional Databases to Hide Sensitive Association Rules," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 33(1), pages 152-178, March.
    3. Yi Qian & Hui Xie, 2013. "Drive More Effective Data-Based Innovations: Enhancing the Utility of Secure Databases," NBER Working Papers 19586, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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    6. Zhiqiang (Eric) Zheng & Peter Fader & Balaji Padmanabhan, 2012. "From Business Intelligence to Competitive Intelligence: Inferring Competitive Measures Using Augmented Site-Centric Data," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 23(3-part-1), pages 698-720, September.
    7. Xue Bai & Ram Gopal & Manuel Nunez & Dmitry Zhdanov, 2012. "On the Prevention of Fraud and Privacy Exposure in Process Information Flow," INFORMS Journal on Computing, INFORMS, vol. 24(3), pages 416-432, August.
    8. Abhijeet Ghoshal & Jing Hao & Syam Menon & Sumit Sarkar, 2020. "Hiding Sensitive Information when Sharing Distributed Transactional Data," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 31(2), pages 473-490, June.
    9. Yi Qian & Hui Xie, 2015. "Drive More Effective Data-Based Innovations: Enhancing the Utility of Secure Databases," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 61(3), pages 520-541, March.

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