Privacy Preserving Utility Mining: A Survey

In big data era, the collected data usually contains rich information and hidden knowledge. Utility-oriented pattern mining and analytics have shown a powerful ability to explore these ubiquitous data, which may be collected from various fields and applications, such as market basket analysis, retail, click-stream analysis, medical analysis, and bioinformatics. However, analysis of these data with sensitive private information raises privacy concerns. To achieve better trade-off between utility maximizing and privacy preserving, Privacy-Preserving Utility Mining (PPUM) has become a critical issue in recent years. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of PPUM. We first present the background of utility mining, privacy-preserving data mining and PPUM, then introduce the related preliminaries and problem formulation of PPUM, as well as some key evaluation criteria for PPUM. In particular, we present and discuss the current state-of-the-art PPUM algorithms, as well as their advantages and deficiencies in detail. Finally, we highlight and discuss some technical challenges and open directions for future research on PPUM.Comment: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, 10 page

State of the Art in Privacy Preserving Data Mining

Privacy is one of the most important properties an information system must satisfy. A relatively new trend shows that classical access control techniques are not sufficient to guarantee privacy when Data Mining techniques are used. Such a trend, especially in the context of public databases, or in the context of sensible information related to critical infrastructures, represents, nowadays a not negligible thread. Privacy Preserving Data Mining (PPDM) algorithms have been recently introduced with the aim of modifying the database in such a way to prevent the discovery of sensible information. This is a very complex task and there exist in the scientific literature some different approaches to the problem. In this work we present a "Survey" of the current PPDM methodologies which seem promising for the future.JRC.G.6-Sensors, radar technologies and cybersecurit

Review on Present State-of-the-Art of Secure and Privacy Preserving Data Mining Techniques

As people of every walk of life are using Internet for various purposes there is growing evidence of proliferation of sensitive information. Security and privacy of data became an important concern. For this reason privacy preserving data mining (PPDM) has been an active research area. PPDM is a process discovering knowledge from voluminous data while protecting sensitive information. In this paper we explore the present state-of-the-art of secure and privacy preserving data mining algorithms or techniques which will help in real world usage of enterprise applications. The techniques discussed include randomized method, k-Anonymity, l-Diversity, t-Closeness, m-Privacy and other PPDM approaches. This paper also focuses on SQL injection attacks and prevention measures. The paper provides research insights into the areas of secure and privacy preserving data mining techniques or algorithms besides presenting gaps in the research that can be used to plan future research

Efficient distributed privacy preserving clustering

With recent growing concerns about data privacy, researchers have focused their attention to developing new algorithms to perform privacy preserving data mining. However, methods proposed until now are either very inefficient to deal with large datasets, or compromise privacy with accuracy of data mining results. Secure multiparty computation helps researchers develop privacy preserving data mining algorithms without having to compromise quality of data mining results with data privacy. Also it provides formal guarantees about privacy. On the other hand, algorithms based on secure multiparty computation often rely on computationally expensive cryptographic operations, thus making them infeasible to use in real world scenarios. In this thesis, we study the problem of privacy preserving distributed clustering and propose an efficient and secure algorithm for this problem based on secret sharing and compare it to the state of the art. Experiments show that our algorithm has a lower communication overhead and a much lower computation overhead than the state of the art

TraVaS: Differentially Private Trace Variant Selection for Process Mining

In the area of industrial process mining, privacy-preserving event data publication is becoming increasingly relevant. Consequently, the trade-off between high data utility and quantifiable privacy poses new challenges. State-of-the-art research mainly focuses on differentially private trace variant construction based on prefix expansion methods. However, these algorithms face several practical limitations such as high computational complexity, introducing fake variants, removing frequent variants, and a bounded variant length. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for direct differentially private trace variant release which uses anonymized \textit{partition selection} strategies to overcome the aforementioned restraints. Experimental results on real-life event data show that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both plain data utility and result utility preservation

Privacy Preserving Data Mining For Horizontally Distributed Medical Data Analysis

To build reliable prediction models and identify useful patterns, assembling data sets from databases maintained by different sources such as hospitals becomes increasingly common; however, it might divulge sensitive information about individuals and thus leads to increased concerns about privacy, which in turn prevents different parties from sharing information. Privacy Preserving Distributed Data Mining (PPDDM) provides a means to address this issue without accessing actual data values to avoid the disclosure of information beyond the final result. In recent years, a number of state-of-the-art PPDDM approaches have been developed, most of which are based on Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC). SMC requires expensive communication cost and sophisticated secure computation. Besides, the mining progress is inevitable to slow down due to the increasing volume of the aggregated data. In this work, a new framework named Privacy-Aware Non-linear SVM (PAN-SVM) is proposed to build a PPDDM model from multiple data sources. PAN-SVM employs the Secure Sum Protocol to protect privacy at the bottom layer, and reduces the complex communication and computation via Nystrom matrix approximation and Eigen decomposition methods at the medium layer. The top layer of PAN-SVM speeds up the whole algorithm for large scale datasets. Based on the proposed framework of PAN-SVM, a Privacy Preserving Multi-class Classifier is built, and the experimental results on several benchmark datasets and microarray datasets show its abilities to improve classification accuracy compared with a regular SVM. In addition, two Privacy Preserving Feature Selection methods are also proposed based on PAN-SVM, and tested by using benchmark data and real world data. PAN-SVM does not depend on a trusted third party; all participants collaborate equally. Many experimental results show that PAN-SVM can not only effectively solve the problem of collaborative privacy-preserving data mining by building non-linear classification rules, but also significantly improve the performance of built classifiers

Trading Indistinguishability-based Privacy and Utility of Complex Data

The collection and processing of complex data, like structured data or infinite streams, facilitates novel applications. At the same time, it raises privacy requirements by the data owners. Consequently, data administrators use privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) to sanitize the data, that are frequently based on indistinguishability-based privacy definitions. Upon engineering PETs, a well-known challenge is the privacy-utility trade-off. Although literature is aware of a couple of trade-offs, there are still combinations of involved entities, privacy definition, type of data and application, in which we miss valuable trade-offs. In this thesis, for two important groups of applications processing complex data, we study (a) which indistinguishability-based privacy and utility requirements are relevant, (b) whether existing PETs solve the trade-off sufficiently, and (c) propose novel PETs extending the state-of-the-art substantially in terms of methodology, as well as achieved privacy or utility. Overall, we provide four contributions divided into two parts. In the first part, we study applications that analyze structured data with distance-based mining algorithms. We reveal that an essential utility requirement is the preservation of the pair-wise distances of the data items. Consequently, we propose distance-preserving encryption (DPE), together with a general procedure to engineer respective PETs by leveraging existing encryption schemes. As proof of concept, we apply it to SQL log mining, useful for database performance tuning. In the second part, we study applications that monitor query results over infinite streams. To this end, -event differential privacy is state-of-the-art. Here, PETs use mechanisms that typically add noise to query results. First, we study state-of-the-art mechanisms with respect to the utility they provide. Conducting the so far largest benchmark that fulfills requirements derived from limitations of prior experimental studies, we contribute new insights into the strengths and weaknesses of existing mechanisms. One of the most unexpected, yet explainable result, is a baseline supremacy. It states that one of the two baseline mechanisms delivers high or even the best utility. A natural follow-up question is whether baseline mechanisms already provide reasonable utility. So, second, we perform a case study from the area of electricity grid monitoring revealing two results. First, achieving reasonable utility is only possible under weak privacy requirements. Second, the utility measured with application-specific utility metrics decreases faster than the sanitization error, that is used as utility metric in most studies, suggests. As a third contribution, we propose a novel differential privacy-based privacy definition called Swellfish privacy. It allows tuning utility beyond incremental -event mechanism design by supporting time-dependent privacy requirements. Formally, as well as by experiments, we prove that it increases utility significantly. In total, our thesis contributes substantially to the research field, and reveals directions for future research