Privacy Preserving Clustering

The freedom and transparency of information flow on the Internet has heightened concerns of privacy. Given a set of data items, clustering algorithms group similar items together. Clustering has many applications, such as customer-behavior analysis, targeted marketing, forensics, and bioinformatics. In this paper, we present the design and analysis of a privacy-preserving k-means clustering algorithm, where only the cluster means at the various steps of the algorithm are revealed to the participating parties. The crucial step in our privacy-preserving k-means is privacy-preserving computation of cluster means. We present two protocols (one based on oblivious polynomial evaluation and the second based on homomorphic encryption) for privacy-preserving computation of cluster means. We have a JAVA implementation of our algorithm. Using our implementation, we have performed a thorough evaluation of our privacy-preserving clustering algorithm on three data sets. Our evaluation demonstrates...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ESORICS
• Authors: Somesh Jha, Louis Kruger, Patrick McDaniel
• Keywords: Cluster Means, Clustering Algorithm, ESORICS 2005, K-means Clustering Algorithm, Security Privacy