Utility-maximizing event stream suppression

Complex Event Processing (CEP) has emerged as a technology for monitoring event streams in search of user specified event patterns. When a CEP system is deployed in sensitive environments the user may wish to mitigate leaks of private information while ensuring that useful nonsensitive patterns are still reported. In this paper we consider how to suppress events in a stream to reduce the disclosure of sensitive patterns while maximizing the detection of nonsensitive patterns. We first formally define the problem of utility-maximizing event suppression with privacy preferences, and analyze its computational hardness. We then design a suite of real-time solutions to solve this problem. Our first solution optimally solves the problem at the event-type level. The second solution, at the event-instance level, further optimizes the event-type level solution by exploiting runtime event distributions using advanced pattern match cardinality estimation techniques. Our user study and experimental evaluation over both real-world and synthetic event streams show that our algorithms are effective in maximizing utility yet still efficient enough to offer near real-time system responsiveness.