Simultaneous Discrimination Prevention and Privacy Protection in Data Publishing and Mining

Abstract

Data mining is an increasingly important technology for extracting useful knowledge hidden in large collections of data. There are, however, negative social perceptions about data mining, among which potential privacy violation and potential discrimination. Automated data collection and data mining techniques such as classification have paved the way to making automated decisions, like loan granting/denial, insurance premium computation. If the training datasets are biased in what regards discriminatory attributes like gender, race, religion, discriminatory decisions may ensue. In the first part of this thesis, we tackle discrimination prevention in data mining and propose new techniques applicable for direct or indirect discrimination prevention individually or both at the same time. We discuss how to clean training datasets and outsourced datasets in such a way that direct and/or indirect discriminatory decision rules are converted to legitimate (non-discriminatory) classification rules. In the second part of this thesis, we argue that privacy and discrimination risks should be tackled together. We explore the relationship between privacy preserving data mining and discrimination prevention in data mining to design holistic approaches capable of addressing both threats simultaneously during the knowledge discovery process. As part of this effort, we have investigated for the first time the problem of discrimination and privacy aware frequent pattern discovery, i.e. the sanitization of the collection of patterns mined from a transaction database in such a way that neither privacy-violating nor discriminatory inferences can be inferred on the released patterns. Moreover, we investigate the problem of discrimination and privacy aware data publishing, i.e. transforming the data, instead of patterns, in order to simultaneously fulfill privacy preservation and discrimination prevention.