Collusion-Free Privacy Preserving Data Mining

Distributed association rule mining is an integral part of data mining that extracts useful information hidden in distributed data sources. As local frequent itemsets are globalized from data sources, sensitive information about individual data sources needs high protection. Different privacy preserving data mining approaches for distributed environment have been proposed but in the existing approaches, collusion among the participating sites reveal sensitive information about the other sites. In this paper, the authors propose a collusion-free algorithm for mining global frequent itemsets in a distributed environment with minimal communication among sites. This algorithm uses the techniques of splitting and sanitizing the itemsets and communicates to random sites in two different phases, thus making it difficult for the colluders to retrieve sensitive information. Results show that the consequence of collusion is reduced to a greater extent without affecting mining performance and confirms optimal communication among sites.