Association Rule Hiding Methods
set of sensitive rules by replacing known values by
unknowns, while minimizing the side effects on non-
sensitive rules. Note here that the use of unknowns
needs a high level of sophistication in order to perform
equally well as the perturbation approaches that we
presented before, although the quality of the datasets
after hiding is higher than that in the perturbation ap-
proaches since values do not change behind the scene.
Although the work presented under this category is
in an early stage, the authors do give arguments as to
the difficulty of recovering sensitive rules as well as
they formulate experiments that test the side effects
on non-sensitive rules. Among the new ideas which
were proposed in this work, is the modification of
the basic notions of support and confidence in order
to accommodate for the use of unknowns (think how
an unknown value will count during the computation
of these two metrics) and the introduction of a new
parameter, the safety margin, which was employed in
order to account for the distance below the support or
the confidence threshold that a sensitive rule needs to
maintain. Further studies related to the use of unknown
values for the hiding of sensitive rules are underway
(Wang & Jafari, 2005).
Recent Approaches
The problem of inverse frequent itemset mining was
defined by Mielikainen (2003) in order to answer the
following research problem: Given a collection of
frequent itemsets and their support, find a transactional
database such that the new database precisely agrees
with the supports of the given frequent itemset collec-
tion while the supports of other itemsets would be less
than the predetermined threshold. A recent study (Chen,
Orlowska & Li, 2004) investigates the problem of us-
ing the concept of inverse frequent itemset mining to
solve the association rule hiding problem. In particular,
the authors start from a database on which they apply
association rule mining. After the association rules
have been mined and organized into an itemset lattice,
the lattice is revised by taking into consideration the
sensitive rules. This means that the frequent itemsets
that have generated the sensitive rules are forced to
become infrequent in the lattice. Given the itemsets
that remain frequent in the lattice after the hiding of
the sensitive itemsets, the proposed algorithm tries to
reconstruct a new database, the mining of which will
produce the given frequent itemsets.
Another study (Menon, Sarkar & Mukherjee 2005)
was the first to formulate the association rule hiding A
problem as an integer programming task by taking
into account the occurrences of sensitive itemsets in
the transactions. The solution of the integer program-
ming problem provides an answer as to the minimum
number of transactions that need to be sanitized for
each sensitive itemset to become hidden. Based on
the integer programming solution, two heuristic ap-
proaches are presented for actually identifying the
items to be sanitized.
A border based approach along with a hiding al-
gorithm is presented in Sun & Yu (2005). The authors
propose the use of the border of frequent itemsets to
drive the hiding algorithm. In particular, given a set
of sensitive frequent itemsets, they compute the new
(revised) border on which the sensitive itemsets have
just turned to infrequent. In this way, the hiding algo-
rithm is forced to maintain the itemsets in the revised
positive border while is trying to hide those itemsets in
the negative border which have moved from frequent
to infrequent. A maxmin approach (Moustakides &
Verykios, 2006) is proposed that relies on the border
revision theory by using the maxmin criterion which is a
method in decision theory for maximizing the minimum
gain. The maxmin approach improves over the basic
border based approach both in attaining hiding results
of better quality and in achieving much lower execu-
tion times. An exact approach (Gkoulalas-Divanis &
Verykios 2006) that is also based on the border revision
theory relies on an integer programming formulation of
the hiding problem that is efficiently solved by using a
Binary Integer Programming approach. The important
characteristic of the exact solutions is that they do not
create any hiding side effects.
Wu, Chiang & Chen (2007) present a limited side
effect approach that modifies the original database to
hide sensitive rules by decreasing their support or con-
fidence. The proposed approach first classifies all the
valid modifications that can affect the sensitive rules,
the non-sensitive rules, and the spurious rules. Then,
it uses heuristic methods to modify the transactions in
an order that increases the number of hidden sensitive
rules, while reducing the number of modified entries.
Amiri (2007) presents three data sanitization heuristics
that demonstrate high data utility at the expense of com-
putational speed. The first heuristic reduces the support
of the sensitive itemsets by deleting a set of supporting
transactions. The second heuristic modifies, instead of