Privacy Violation and Detection Using Pattern Mining Techniques

Privacy, its violations and techniques to bypass privacy violation have grabbed the centre-stage of both academia and industry in recent months. Corporations worldwide have become conscious of the implications of privacy violation and its impact on them and to other stakeholders. Moreover, nations across the world are coming out with privacy protecting legislations to prevent data privacy violations. Such legislations however expose organizations to the issues of intentional or unintentional violation of privacy data. A violation by either malicious external hackers or by internal employees can expose the organizations to costly litigations. In this paper, we propose PRIVDAM; a data mining based intelligent architecture of a Privacy Violation Detection and Monitoring system whose purpose is to detect possible privacy violations and to prevent them in the future. Experimental evaluations show that our approach is scalable and robust and that it can detect privacy violations or chances of violations quite accurately. Please contact the author for full text at [email protected]

DATA MINING: A SEGMENTATION ANALYSIS OF U.S. GROCERY SHOPPERS

Consumers make choices about where to shop based on their preferences for a shopping environment and experience as well as the selection of products at a particular store. This study illustrates how retail firms and marketing analysts can utilize data mining techniques to better understand customer profiles and behavior. Among the key areas where data mining can produce new knowledge is the segmentation of customer data bases according to demographics, buying patterns, geographics, attitudes, and other variables. This paper builds profiles of grocery shoppers based on their preferences for 33 retail grocery store characteristics. The data are from a representative, nationwide sample of 900 supermarket shoppers collected in 1999. Six customer profiles are found to exist, including (1) "Time Pressed Meat Eaters", (2) "Back to Nature Shoppers", (3) "Discriminating Leisure Shoppers", (4) "No Nonsense Shoppers", (5) "The One Stop Socialites", and (6) "Middle of the Road Shoppers". Each of the customer profiles is described with respect to the underlying demographics and income. Consumer shopping segments cut across most demographic groups but are somewhat correlated with income. Hierarchical lists of preferences reveal that low price is not among the top five most important store characteristics. Experience and preferences for internet shopping shows that of the 44% who have access to the internet, only 3% had used it to order food.Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Sensor-based Knowledge Discovery from a Large Quantity of Situational Variables

A new methodology called “sensor-based knowledge discovery”, which utilizes wearable sensors and statistical analysis, is proposed and evaluated. This methodology facilitates identifying new knowledge that can improve business outcome. It utilizes wearable sensors to unobtrusively capture people’s location, motion, and social interaction with others. The captured data is converted into multi-dimensional situational variables and then statistically analyzed to deliver a “rule set,” which forms the basis of new knowledge related to business outcome. The methodology was evaluated through a case study at a retail store. A hypothetical rule, that is, a particular area (a so-called “hot spot”) in the store where employee’s presence correlates with average sales per customer, was identified. Based on the identified rule, a measure to concentrate employees in that area was initiated. Consequently, increasing employees’ presence (“staying time”) in the hot spot by 70% increased average sales per customer by 15%. This result demonstrates the effectiveness of the methodology; namely, the new sensor-based knowledge discovery can improve actual business performance

Comparing Data Mining Classification Algorithms in Detection of Simbox Fraud

Fraud detection in telecommunication industry has been a major challenge. Various fraud management systems are being used in the industry to detect and prevent increasingly sophisticated fraud activities. However, such systems are rule-based and require a continuous monitoring by subject matter experts. Once a fraudster changes its fraudulent behavior, a modification to the rules is required. Sometimes, the modification involves building a whole new set of rules from scratch, which is a toilsome task that may by repeated many times. In recent years, datamining techniques have gained popularity in fraud detection in telecommunication industry. Unlike rule based Simbox detection, data mining algorithms are able to detect fraud cases when there is no exact match with a predefined fraud pattern, this comes from the fuzziness and the statistical nature that is built into the data mining algorithms. To better understand the performance of data mining algorithms in fraud detection, this paper conducts comparisons among four major algorithms: Boosted Trees Classifier, Support Vector Machines, Logistic Classifier, and Neural Networks. Results of the work show that Boosted Trees and Logistic Classifiers performed the best among the four algorithms with a false-positive ratio less than 1%. Support Vector Machines performed almost like Boosted Trees and Logistic Classifier, but with a higher false-positive ratio of 8%. Neural Networks had an accuracy rate of 60% with a false positive ratio of 40%. The conclusion is that Boosted Trees and Support Vector Machines classifiers are among the better algorithms to be used in the Simbox fraud detections because of their high accuracy and low false-positive ratios