On Privacy in Time Series Data Mining

Traditional research on preserving privacy in data mining focuses on time-invariant privacy issues. With the emergence of time series data mining, traditional snapshot-based privacy issues need to be extended to be multi-dimensional with the addition of time dimension. We find current techniques to preserve privacy in data mining is not effective in preserving time-domain privacy. We present data flow separation attack on privacy in time series data mining, which is based on blind source separation techniques from statistical signal processing. Our experiments with real and synthetic data show that this attack is effective. By combining the data flow separation method and the frequency matching method, an attacker can identify data sources and compromise time-domain privacy. We propose possible countermeasures to the data flow separation attack in the paper.