Privacy preserving mining of distributed data has numerous applications. Each application poses different constraints: What is meant by privacy, what are the desired results, how is the data distributed, what are the constraints on collaboration and cooperative computing, etc. We suggest that the solution to this is a toolkit of components that can be combined for specific privacy-preserving data mining applications. This paper presents some components of such a toolkit, and shows how they can be used to solve several privacy-preserving data mining problems.

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Privacy considerations often constrain data mining projects. This paper addresses the problem of association rule mining where transactions are distributed across sources. Each site holds some attributes of each transaction, and the sites wish to collaborate to identify globally valid association rules. However, the sites must not reveal individual transaction data. We present a two-party algorithm for efficiently discovering frequent itemsets with minimum support levels, without either site revealing individual transaction values.

Privacy and security concerns can prevent sharing of data, derailing data mining projects. Distributed knowledge discovery, if done correctly, can alleviate this problem. The key is to obtain valid results, while providing guarantees on the (non)disclosure of data. We present a method for k-means clustering when different sites contain different attributes for a common set of entities. Each site learns the cluster of each entity, but learns nothing about the attributes at other sites.

Privacy and security concerns can prevent sharing of data, derailing data mining projects. Distributed knowledge discovery, if done correctly, can alleviate this problem. The key is to obtain valid results, while providing guarantees on the (non)disclosure of data. We present a method for k-means clustering when different sites contain different attributes for a common set of entities. Each site learns the cluster of each entity, but learns nothing about the attributes at other sites.