A New Approach to Sensitive Rule Hiding

Privacy preserving data mining is a novel research direction in data mining and statistical databases, which has recently been proposed in response to the concerns of preserving personal or sensible information derived from data mining algorithms. There have been two types of privacy proposed concerning data mining. The first type of privacy, called output privacy, is that the data is altered so that the mining result will preserve certain privacy. The second type of privacy, called input privacy, is that the data is manipulated so that the mining result is not affected or minimally affected. For output privacy in hiding association rules, current approaches require hidden rules or patterns to be given in advance. However, to specify hidden rules, entire data mining process needs to be executed. For some applications, only certain sensitive rules that contain sensitive items are required to hide. In this work, an algorithm SRH (Sensitive Rule Hiding) is proposed, to hide the sensitive rules that contain sensitive items, so that sensitive rules containing specified sensitive items on the right hand side of the rule cannot be inferred through association rule mining. Example illustrating the proposed approach is given. The characteristics of the algorithm are discussed.