Modifying Transactional Databases to Hide Sensitive Association Rules

Although firms recognize the value in sharing data with supply chain partners, many remain reluctant to share for fear of sensitive information potentially making its way to competitors. Approaches that can help hide sensitive information could alleviate such concerns and increase the number of firms that are willing to share. Sensitive information in transactional databases often manifests itself in the form of association rules. The sensitive association rules can be concealed by altering transactions so that they remain hidden when the data are mined by the partner. The problem of hiding these rules in the data are computationally difficult (NP-hard), and extant approaches are all heuristic in nature. To our knowledge, this is the first paper that introduces the problem as a nonlinear integer formulation to hide the sensitive association rule while minimizing the alterations needed in the data set. We apply transformations that linearize the constraints and derive various results that help reduce the size of the problem to be solved. Our results show that although the nonlinear integer formulations are not practical, the linearizations and problem-reduction steps make a significant impact on solvability and solution time. This approach mitigates potential risks associated with sharing and should increase data sharing among supply chain partners.

Basic Independence Results for Maximum Entropy Reasoning Based on Relational Conditionals

Maximum entropy reasoning (ME-reasoning) based on relational conditionals combines both the capability of ME-distributions to express uncertain knowledge in a way that excellently fits to commonsense, and the great expressivity of an underlying first-order logic. The drawbacks of this approach are its high complexity which is generally paired with a costly domain size dependency, and its non-transparency due to the non-existent a priori independence assumptions as against in Bayesian networks. In this paper we present some independence results for ME-reasoning based on the aggregating semantics for relational conditionals that help to disentangle the composition of ME-distributions, and therefore, lead to a problem reduction and provide structural insights into ME-reasoning.