A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Collaborative Association Rule Mining in Cloud

Collaborative Data Mining facilitates multiple organizations to integrate their datasets and extract useful knowledge from their joint datasets for mutual benefits. The knowledge extracted in this manner is found to be superior to the knowledge extracted locally from a single organization's dataset. With the rapid development of outsourcing, there is a growing interest for organizations to outsource their data mining tasks to a cloud environment to effectively address their economic and performance demands. However, due to privacy concerns and stringent compliance regulations, organizations do not want to share their private datasets neither with the cloud nor with other participating organizations. In this paper, we address the problem of outsourcing association rule mining task to a federated cloud environment in a privacy-preserving manner. Specifically, we propose a privacy-preserving framework that allows a set of users, each with a private dataset, to outsource their encrypted databases and the cloud returns the association rules extracted from the aggregated encrypted databases to the participating users. Our proposed solution ensures the confidentiality of the outsourced data and also minimizes the users' participation during the association rule mining process. Additionally, we show that the proposed solution is secure under the standard semi-honest model and demonstrate its practicality.