COMPUSOFT, An international journal of advanced computer technology, 2 (3), March-2013 (Volume-II, Issue-III)

ISSN:2320-0790

An Efficient Technique for Protecting Sensitive Information

1

Abhishek Diwan, 2Prof. Alpana Singh

M Tech Student, Medicaps Institute of Technology & Management Indore (M.P.)

Asst. Professor, Medicaps Institute of Technology & Management Indore (M.P.)

Abstract: Data mining services require accurate input data for their results to be meaningful, but privacy concerns may
influence users to provide spurious information. To preserve client privacy in the data mining process, a variety of techniques
based on random perturbation of data records have been proposed recently. One known fact which is very important in data
mining is discovering the association rules from database of transactions where each transaction consists of set of items. Two
important terms support and confidence are associated with each of the association rule. Actually any rule is called as sensitive
if its disclosure risk is above a certain privacy threshold. Sometimes we do not want to disclose sensitive rules to the public
because of confidentiality purposes. There are many approaches to hide certain association rules which take the support and
confidence as a base for algorithms and many more). The proposed work has the basis of reduction of support and confidence of
sensitive rules but this work is not editing or disturbing the given database of transactions directly .The proposed algorithm uses
some modified definition of support and confidence so that it would hide any desired sensitive association rule without any side
effect. Actually the enhanced technique is using the same method (as previously used method) of getting association rules but
modified definitions of support and confidence are used.
Keywords: Data mining, Data hiding, Support, Confidence, and Association rules etc.

prices to us, based on the lower sales. During our next

negotiation with Dedtrees, we find out that with reduced
competition they are unwilling to offer us a low price.
Finally, we start to lose business to our competitors, who
were able to negotiate a better deal with Green paper. The
scenario that has just been presented, indicates the need to
prevent disclosure not only of confidential personal
information from summarized or aggregated data, but also
to prevent data mining techniques from discovering
sensitive knowledge which is not even known to the
database owners. The necessity to combine the
confidentiality and the legitimate needs of data users is
imperative. Every disclosure limitation method has an
impact, which is not always a positive one, on true data
values and relationships. Ideally, these effects can be
quantified so that their anticipated impact on the
completeness and validity of the data can guide the
selection and use of the disclosure limitation method. The
hiding strategies that we propose are based on reducing the
support and confidence of rules that specify how
significant they are. In order to achieve this, transactions
are modified by removing some items, or inserting new

I. INTRODUCTION
Many government agencies, businesses and non-profit
organizations in order to support their short and long term
planning activities, they are searching for a way to collect,
store, analyze and report data about individuals,
households or businesses. Information systems, therefore,
contain confidential information such as social security
numbers, income, credit ratings, type of disease, customer
purchases, etc., that must be properly protected. Let us
suppose that we are negotiating a deal with Dedtrees Paper
Company, as purchasing directors of Big Mart, a large
supermarket chain. They offer their products in reduced
price, if we agree to give them access to our database of
customer purchases. We accept the deal and Dedtrees starts
mining our data. By using an association rule mining tool,
they find that people who purchase skim milk also
purchase Green paper.
Dedtrees now runs a coupon marketing campaign saying
that you can get 50 cents off skim milk with every
purchase of a Dedtrees product. This campaign cuts
heavily into the sales of Green paper, which increases the

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COMPUSOFT, An international journal of advanced computer technology, 2 (3), March-2013 (Volume-II, Issue-III)

items depending on the hiding strategy. The constraint on

the algorithms is that the changes in the database
introduced by the hiding process should be limited, in such
a way that the information loss incurred by the process is
minimal. Selection of the items in a rule to be hidden and
the selection of the transactions that will be modified is a
crucial factor for achieving the minimal information loss
constraint. We also perform a detailed performance
evaluation and validation study in order to prove that the
proposed algorithms are computationally efficient, and
provide certain provisions on the changes that they impose
in the original database. According to this, we try to apply
minimal changes in the database at every step of the hiding
algorithms that we propose.

Let D be a database, R be the set of rules mined from D

based on a minimum support threshold _, and RR be a set
of restrictive rules that must be protected according to
some security/privacy policies. The goal is to transform R
into R_, where R_ represents the set of non-restrictive
rules. In this case, R_ becomes the released set of rules that
is made available for sharing. Ideally, R_ = R - RR.
However, there could be a set of rules r in R_ from which
one could derive or infer a restrictive rule in RR. So in
reality, R_ = R-(RR+RSE), where RSE is the set of nonrestrictive rules that are removed as side effects of the
sanitization process to avoid recovery of RR.It is shown
below in figure:

II. BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK

Data mining is the process of extracting hidden patterns
from data. As more data is gathered, with the amount of
data doubling every three years, data mining is becoming
an increasingly important tool to transform this data into
knowledge. It is commonly used in a wide range of
applications, such as marketing, fraud detection and
scientific discovery. Data mining can be applied to data
sets of any size, and while it can be used to uncover hidden
patterns, it cannot uncover patterns which are not already
present in the data set.

Fig.1

The inference problem in association rule-mining.

The security impact of DM is analyzed in [6] and some

possible approaches to the problem of inference and
discovery of sensitive knowledge in a data mining context
are suggested. The proposed strategies include fuzzyfying
and augmenting the source database and also limiting the
access to the source database by releasing only samples of
the original data. Clifton [7] adopts the last approach as he
studies the correlation between the amount of released data
and the significance of the patterns which are discovered.
He also shows how to determine the sample size in such a
way that data mining tools cannot obtain reliable results.
Clifton and Marks in [6] also recognize the necessity of
analyzing the various data mining algorithms in order to
increase the efficiency of any adopted strategy that deals
with disclosure limitation of sensitive data and knowledge.
The solution proposed by Clifton in [7] is independent
from any specific data mining technique; other researchers
[8] propose solutions that prevent disclosure of confidential
information for specific data mining algorithms such as
association rule mining and classification rule mining.
Classification mining algorithms may use sensitive data to
rank objects; each group of objects has a description given
by a combination of non sensitive attributes. The sets of
descriptions, obtained for a certain value of the sensitive
attribute, are referred to as description space. For DecisionRegion-based algorithms, the description space generated
by each value of the sensitive attribute can be determined a
priori. The authors in [4] first identify two major criteria
which can be used to assess the output of a classification
inference system and then they use these criteria, in the
context of Decision-Region based algorithms, to inspect
and to modify, if necessary, the description of a sensitive
object so that they can be sure that it is not sensitive.

Data mining extracts novel and useful knowledge

from data and has become an effective analysis and
decision means in corporation. Two problems are
addressed in PPDM: one is the protection of private data;
another is the protection of sensitive rules (knowledge)
contained in the data. The former settles how to get normal
mining results when private data cannot be accessed
accurately; the latter settles how to protect sensitive rules
contained in the data from being discovered, while nonsensitive rules can still be mined normally. The latter
problem is called knowledge hiding in database in (KHD)
which is opposite to knowledge discovery in database
(KDD). And association rule hiding problem we focus is
one of problems in KHD. In data mining, association rule
learning is a popular and well researched method for
discovering interesting relations between variables in large
databases. Piatetsky- Shapiro describes analyzing and
presenting strong rules discovered in databases using
different measures of interestingness. Based on the concept
of strong rules, Agrawal et al introduced association rules
for discovering regularities between products in large scale
transaction data recorded by point-of-sale (POS) systems in
supermarkets. For example, the rule Found in the sales data
of a supermarket would indicate that if a customer buys
onions and potatoes together, he or she is likely to also buy
beef. Such information can be used as the basis for
decisions about marketing activities such as, e.g.,
promotional pricing or product placements. In addition to
the above example from market basket analysis association
rules are employed today in many application areas
including Web usage mining, intrusion detection and
bioinformatics

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COMPUSOFT, An international journal of advanced computer technology, 2 (3), March-2013 (Volume-II, Issue-III)

There is a large amount of work related to association rule

hiding. Maximum researchers have worked on the basis of
reducing the support and confidence of sensitive
association rules ([1, 2, and 5]). ISL and DSR are the
common approaches used to hide the sensitive rules.
Actually any given specific rules to be hidden, many
approaches for hiding association, classification and
clustering rules have been proposed. Some of the
researchers have used data perturbation techniques ([3]) to
modify the confidential data values in such a way that the
approximate data mining results could be obtained from the
modified version of the database. Some researchers also
recognize the necessity of analyzing the various data
mining algorithms in order to increase the efficiency of any
adopted strategy that deals with disclosure limitation of
sensitive data and knowledge. Also disclosure limitation of
sensitive knowledge by data mining algorithms, based on
the retrieval of association rules, has been recently
investigated. The proposed work also has the basis of
reduction of support and confidence of sensitive rules in
which some modified terms and some new variable are
used to do the job.

sanitize their data and try to block as many inference

channels as possible to prevent other parties from finding
what they consider sensitive. Data sanitization is defined as
the process of making sensitive information in nonproduction databases safe for wider visibility. However,
sanitized databases are presumed secure and useful for data
mining, in particular, for extracting association rules.
To hide any specified association rule X Y this
algorithm works on the basis of confidence (X Y) and
support (X Y). To hide any sensitive rule X Y, this
algorithm first finds the value of support (sup) and
confidence (conf) in the available set of rules and then it
computes the support and confidence of the sensitive rule
using following:
Confidence (X Y) = (conf * 1/3);
Support (X Y) = (sup * 1/3);
Procedure:
//find value of support and confidence
Select confidence into conf from database.
Select support into supp from database.

III. PROBLEM STATEMENT

For each X
{
// Now check all the rules containing sensitive element x.
For each rule R which contain X on LHS OR RHS.
{
While (conf(R) >= MCT)
{
Set confidence(X Y) = (conf * 1/3);
Set support (X Y) = (sup * 1/3);
}
}
}
End of procedure

The problem of sensitive rule hiding is described as

follows:
Given a transaction database, MST, MCT, a set of strong
rules, and a set of sensitive items, how can we modify the
database such that using the same MST and MCT, the set
of strong rules in the modified database satisfies all the
constraints: 1) no sensitive rule, 2) no lost rule, and 3) no
false rule?
Let D be the database of transactions and J = {J1, ..., Jn} be
the set of items. A transaction T includes one or more items
in J . An association rule has the form X =>Y , where X
and Y are non-empty sets of items (i.e. X and Y are subsets
of J) such that X Y = Null. A set of items is called an
itemset, while X is called the antecedent. The support of an
item (or itemset) x is the percentage of transactions from D
in which that item or itemset occurs in the database The
confidence or strength c for an association rule X =>Y is
the ratio of the number of transactions that contain X or Y
to the number of transactions that contain X.
The problem of mining association rule is to find all rules
that have support and confidence greater then user
specified minimum support threshold (MST) and minimum
confidence threshold (MCT).

V. RESULT ANALYSIS & CONCLUSION

An Example Data Set
Suppose there is a database of transactions as below:
TID
T1
T2
T3
T4
T5

Items
ABD
B
ACD
AB
ABD

IV. PROPOSED APPROACH

One has also given a MST of 60% and a MCT of 70%. One
can see four association rules can be found as below:

Internet communication technology has made this world

very competitive. In their struggle to keep customers, to
approach new customers or even to enhance services and
decision making, data owners need to share their data for a
common good. Privacy concerns have been influencing
data owners and preventing them from achieving the
maximum benefit of data sharing. Data owners usually

AB
BA
AD
DA

81

(60%, 75%)
(60%, 75%)
(60%, 75%)
(60%, 100%)

COMPUSOFT, An international journal of advanced computer technology, 2 (3), March-2013 (Volume-II, Issue-III)

[8]
Now there is a need to hide A.
To hide A. After 1 pass the status of database is as follows:

A B
B A
A D
D A

Support, confidence
20%
25%
50%
60%
20%
25%
43%
60%

So it is clear that this approach is hiding all the given

sensitive rules successfully without any side effect in small
as well as large databases. Previous algorithm (Hiding
counter) is also hiding all sensitive rules without any side
effect in small datasets. But when the transactions are too
many then in that case this algorithm is having a major
problem. It takes too many passes to bring down the
support below the threshold. For example: Suppose a
database has 100 transactions. If support of a rule says X ->
Y is 80%. If MST is 30% then this algorithm will require
170 passes to reduce the support to 29%. But our proposed
algorithm will take 1 pass to reduce the support below 30%.
So it is clear that the proposed algorithm is more efficient.
VI. REFERENCES
[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

Shyue-Liang Wang, Yu-Huei Lee, Steven Billis,

Ayat Jafari "Hiding Sensitive Items in Privacy
Preserving Association Rule Mining" 2004 IEEE
International Conference on Systems, Man and
Cybernetics
Vassilios S. Verykios, Ahmed K. Elmagarmid,
Elisa Bertino, Yucel Saygin and Elena
Dasseni"Association
Rule
Hiding",
IEEE
Transactions
on
Knowledge
and
Data
Engineering, Vol. 16No. 4, April 2004.
R. Agrawal and R. Srikant, "Privacy preserving
data mining", In ACM SIGMOD Conference on
Management of Data, pages 439450, Dallas,
Texas, May 2000.
Vi-Hung Wu, Chia-Ming Chiang, and Arbee L.P.
Chen, Senior Member, IEEE Computer Society
Hiding Sensitive Association Rules with Limited
Side Effects IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
KNOWLEDGE AND DATA ENGINEERING,
VOL. 19, NO.1, JANUARY 200
S. Oliveira, o. Zaiane, "Algorithms for Balancing
Privacy and Knowledge Discovery in Association
Rule Mining", Proceedings of 71 th International
Database
Engineering
and
Applications
SYmposium (IDEAS03), Hong Kong, July 2003.
C. Clifton and D. Marks, Security and Privacy
Implications of Data Mining, Proc. 1996 ACM
Workshop Data Mining and Knowledge
Discovery, 1996.
C. Clifton, Protecting against Data Mining
through Samples, Proc. 13th IFIP WG11.3 Conf.
Database Security, 1999.

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T. Johnsten and V.V. Raghavan, Impact of

Decision- Region Based Classification Mining
Algorithms on Database Security, Proc. 13th
IFIP WG11.3 Conf. Database Security, 1999