Association Rule Hiding Methods
deleting, the supporting transactions by removing some
items until the sensitive itemsets are protected. The third
heuristic combines the previous two by using the first
approach to identify the sensitive transactions and the
second one to remove items from these transactions,
until the sensitive knowledge is hidden.
Still another approach (Oliveira, Zaiane & Saygin,
2004) investigates the distribution of non-sensitive rules
for security reasons instead of publishing the perturbed
database. The proposed approach presents a rule sani-
tization algorithm for blocking inference channels that
may lead to the disclosure of sensitive rules.
FUTURE TRENDS
Many open issues related to the association rule hiding
problem are still under investigation. The emergence of
sophisticated exact hiding approaches of extremely high
complexity, especially for very large databases, causes
the consideration of efficient parallel approaches to be
employed for the solution of this problem. A lot more
work is in need to provide hiding solutions that take
advantage of the use of unknowns. More sophisticated
techniques need to emerge regarding the solution of the
hiding problem by making use of database reconstruc-
tion approaches. Ongoing work considers yet another
solution which is to append to the original database a
synthetically generated database so that the sensitive
knowledge is hidden in the combined database which
is disclosed to the public.
CONCLUSION
In the information era, privacy comprises one of the
most important issues that need to be thoroughly inves-
tigated and resolved before data and information can be
given to the public to serve different goals. Privacy is
not constrained to personally identifiable information,
but it can be equally well refer to business information
or other forms of knowledge which can be produced
from the processing of the data through data mining
and knowledge discovery approaches. The problem of
association rule hiding has been in the forefront of the
privacy preserving data mining area for more than a
decade now. Recently proposed approaches have been
creating enormous impact in the area while at the same
time open the way to new research problems. Although

the systematic work all these years have created a lot of
research results, there is still a lot of work to be done.
Apart from ongoing work in the field we foresee the
need of applying these techniques to operational data
warehouses so that we can evaluate in a real environ-
ment their effectiveness and applicability. We also
envision the necessity of applying knowledge hiding
techniques to distributed environments where infor-
mation and knowledge is shared among collaborators
and/or competitors.
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