Assistant Professor Sarat Kumar Chettri of Assam Don Bosco University’s Department of CSc &E and IT, at Don Bosco College of Engineering and Technology Azara, presented a research paper on “Privacy-Preserving challenges in Data Mining,” 11 April 2014.

The aim of Privacy-Preserving Data Mining (PPDM) is to extract relevant knowledge from large amount of data while protecting at the same time private and sensitive information of individuals.

“Data mining is a technique that

deals with the non-trivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from large datasets or databases,” says Mr Chettri.

This information, Mr Chetttri elaborates, “is used to gain relevant knowledge which enables certain tasks to be performed in various areas of marketing, medical, sales and finance, and demographic study.”

The challenge facing researchers warns Mr Chettri is that “the data mining algorithms run on databases containing information about individuals which may be sensitive in nature and may raise various social, ethical and legal issues if got revealed.”

He adds, “the sensitive information about individuals may consist of their medical records, biometric information, financial information, and so on.”

While the topic of privacy has been traditionally studied in the context of cryptography and information-hiding, recent advancement of data mining techniques has renewed interest in this field.

“With growing concerns of data privacy, preserving the privacy of individual’s data has become a persistent issue,” says Mr Chettri stating “that it should not restrain the knowledge discovery process.”

Thus irrespective of the type of data whether numerical, categorical, mixed, or time series, accurate analyses of such data with preserved privacy continues to be a challenging task.