Dynamic itemset hiding algorithm for multiple sensitive support thresholds

Abstract

This article describes how association rule mining is used for extracting relations between items in transactional databases and is beneficial for decision-making. However, association rule mining can pose a threat to the privacy of the knowledge when the data is shared without hiding the confidential association rules of the data owner. One of the ways hiding an association rule from the database is to conceal the itemsets (co-occurring items) from which the sensitive association rules are generated. These sensitive itemsets are sanitized by the itemset hiding processes. Most of the existing solutions consider single support thresholds and assume that the databases are static, which is not true in real life. In this article, the authors propose a novel itemset hiding algorithm designed for the dynamic database environment and consider multiple itemset support thresholds. Performance comparisons of the algorithm is done with two dynamic algorithms on six different databases. Findings show that their dynamic algorithm is more efficient in terms of execution time and information loss and guarantees to hide all sensitive itemsets.