Fuzzy based clustering algorithm for privacy preserving data mining

Sharing of data among multiple organisations is required in many situations. The shared data may contain sensitive information about individuals which if shared may lead to privacy breach. Thus, maintaining the individual privacy is a great challenge. In order to overcome the challenges involved in data mining, when data needs to be shared, privacy preserving data mining (PPDM) has evolved as a solution. The objective of PPDM is to have the interesting knowledge mined from the data at the same time to maintain the individual privacy. This paper addresses the problem of PPDM by transforming the attributes to fuzzy attributes. Thus, the individual privacy is also maintained, as one cannot predict the exact value, at the same time, better accuracy of mining results is achieved. ID3 and Naive Bayes classification algorithms over three different datasets are used in the experiments to show the effectiveness of the approach.