Privacy Preserving Sequential Patterns Mining for Network Traffic Data

As the total amount of traffic data in network has been growing at an alarming rate, many researches to mine traffic data with the purpose of getting useful information are currently being performed. However, network users' privacy can be compromised during the mining process. In this paper, we propose an efficient and practical privacy preserving sequential pattern mining method on network traffic data. In order to discover frequent sequential patterns without violating privacy, our method uses the N-repository server model and the retention replacement technique. In addition, our method accelerates the overall mining process by maintaining the meta tables so as to quickly determine whether candidate patterns have ever occurred. The various experiments with real network traffic data revealed tile efficiency of the proposed method.