An exact approach with minimum side-effects for association rule hiding

Abstract

Concealing sensitive relationships before sharing a database is of utmost importance in many circumstances. This implies to hide the frequent itemsets corresponding to sensitive association rules by removing some items of the database. Research efforts generally aim at finding out more effective methods in terms of convenience, execution time and side-effect. This paper presents a practical approach for hiding sensitive patterns while allowing as much nonsensitive patterns as possible in the sanitized database. We model the itemset hiding problem as integer programming whereas the objective coefficients allow finding out a solution with minimum loss of nonsensitive itemsets. We evaluate our method using three real datasets from FIMI repository and compared the results with previous exact solution and the heuristic study whose procedures are imposed by new approach. The results show that information loss is dramatically minimized without sacrificing so many modifications on databases.