%0 Journal Article %J Data Min. Knowl. Discov. %D 2015 %T Discrimination- and privacy-aware patterns %A Sara Hajian %A Josep Domingo-Ferrer %A Anna Monreale %A Dino Pedreschi %A Fosca Giannotti %X Data mining is gaining societal momentum due to the ever increasing availability of large amounts of human data, easily collected by a variety of sensing technologies. We are therefore faced with unprecedented opportunities and risks: a deeper understanding of human behavior and how our society works is darkened by a greater chance of privacy intrusion and unfair discrimination based on the extracted patterns and profiles. Consider the case when a set of patterns extracted from the personal data of a population of individual persons is released for a subsequent use into a decision making process, such as, e.g., granting or denying credit. First, the set of patterns may reveal sensitive information about individual persons in the training population and, second, decision rules based on such patterns may lead to unfair discrimination, depending on what is represented in the training cases. Although methods independently addressing privacy or discrimination in data mining have been proposed in the literature, in this context we argue that privacy and discrimination risks should be tackled together, and we present a methodology for doing so while publishing frequent pattern mining results. We describe a set of pattern sanitization methods, one for each discrimination measure used in the legal literature, to achieve a fair publishing of frequent patterns in combination with two possible privacy transformations: one based on k-anonymity and one based on differential privacy. Our proposed pattern sanitization methods based on k-anonymity yield both privacy- and discrimination-protected patterns, while introducing reasonable (controlled) pattern distortion. Moreover, they obtain a better trade-off between protection and data quality than the sanitization methods based on differential privacy. Finally, the effectiveness of our proposals is assessed by extensive experiments. %B Data Min. Knowl. Discov. %V 29 %P 1733–1782 %G eng %U http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10618-014-0393-7 %R 10.1007/s10618-014-0393-7 %0 Conference Paper %B Symposium on Applied Computing, {SAC} 2014, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea - March 24 - 28, 2014 %D 2014 %T Fair pattern discovery %A Sara Hajian %A Anna Monreale %A Dino Pedreschi %A Josep Domingo-Ferrer %A Fosca Giannotti %X Data mining is gaining societal momentum due to the ever increasing availability of large amounts of human data, easily collected by a variety of sensing technologies. We are assisting to unprecedented opportunities of understanding human and society behavior that unfortunately is darkened by several risks for human rights: one of this is the unfair discrimination based on the extracted patterns and profiles. Consider the case when a set of patterns extracted from the personal data of a population of individual persons is released for subsequent use in a decision making process, such as, e.g., granting or denying credit. Decision rules based on such patterns may lead to unfair discrimination, depending on what is represented in the training cases. In this context, we address the discrimination risks resulting from publishing frequent patterns. We present a set of pattern sanitization methods, one for each discrimination measure used in the legal literature, for fair (discrimination-protected) publishing of frequent pattern mining results. Our proposed pattern sanitization methods yield discrimination-protected patterns, while introducing reasonable (controlled) pattern distortion. Finally, the effectiveness of our proposals is assessed by extensive experiments. %B Symposium on Applied Computing, {SAC} 2014, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea - March 24 - 28, 2014 %P 113–120 %U http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2554850.2555043 %R 10.1145/2554850.2555043 %0 Conference Paper %B 12th {IEEE} International Conference on Data Mining Workshops, {ICDM} Workshops, Brussels, Belgium, December 10, 2012 %D 2012 %T Injecting Discrimination and Privacy Awareness Into Pattern Discovery %A Sara Hajian %A Anna Monreale %A Dino Pedreschi %A Josep Domingo-Ferrer %A Fosca Giannotti %X Data mining is gaining societal momentum due to the ever increasing availability of large amounts of human data, easily collected by a variety of sensing technologies. Data mining comes with unprecedented opportunities and risks: a deeper understanding of human behavior and how our society works is darkened by a greater chance of privacy intrusion and unfair discrimination based on the extracted patterns and profiles. Although methods independently addressing privacy or discrimination in data mining have been proposed in the literature, in this context we argue that privacy and discrimination risks should be tackled together, and we present a methodology for doing so while publishing frequent pattern mining results. We describe a combined pattern sanitization framework that yields both privacy and discrimination-protected patterns, while introducing reasonable (controlled) pattern distortion. %B 12th {IEEE} International Conference on Data Mining Workshops, {ICDM} Workshops, Brussels, Belgium, December 10, 2012 %P 360–369 %U http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICDMW.2012.51 %R 10.1109/ICDMW.2012.51