Anonymizing transaction databases for publication

  • Authors:
  • Yabo Xu;Ke Wang;Ada Wai-Chee Fu;Philip S. Yu

  • Affiliations:
  • Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada;Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada;The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong;University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

This paper considers the problem of publishing "transaction data" for research purposes. Each transaction is an arbitrary set of items chosen from a large universe. Detailed transaction data provides an electronic image of one's life. This has two implications. One, transaction data are excellent candidates for data mining research. Two, use of transaction data would raise serious concerns over individual privacy. Therefore, before transaction data is released for data mining, it must be made anonymous so that data subjects cannot be re-identified. The challenge is that transaction data has no structure and can be extremely high dimensional. Traditional anonymization methods lose too much information on such data. To date, there has been no satisfactory privacy notion and solution proposed for anonymizing transaction data. This paper proposes one way to address this issue.