Privacy preserving mining of association rules on horizontally distributed databases

These protocols are based on two main approaches named as: the Randomization approach and the Cryptographic approach. The first one is based on perturbation of the valuable information while the second one uses cryptographic techniques. The randomization approach is much more efficient with reduced accuracy while the cryptographic approach can provide solutions with perfect accuracy. However, the cryptographic approach is a much slower method and requires considerable computation and communication overhead. In this paper, a new protocol is proposed which combines the advantages of the two previous approaches to perform privacy preserving in distributed mining of association rules. Both the privacy and performance characteristics of the proposed protocol are studied and compared with the randomization and cryptographic approaches. The approach introduced in this paper has great advantages, such as higher flexibility and resistance against conspiracy, over the similar methods