LDP-FPMiner: FP-Tree Based Frequent Itemset Mining with Local Differential Privacy

Data aggregation in the setting of local differential privacy (LDP) guarantees strong privacy by providing plausible deniability of sensitive data. Existing works on this issue mostly focused on discovering heavy hitters, leaving the task of frequent itemset mining (FIM) as an open problem. To the best of our knowledge, the-state-of-the-art LDP solution to FIM is the SVSM protocol proposed recently. The SVSM protocol is mainly based on the padding and sampling based frequency oracle (PSFO) protocol, and regarded an itemset as an independent item without considering the frequency consistency among itemsets. In this paper, we propose a novel LDP approach to FIM called LDP-FPMiner based on frequent pattern tree (FP-tree). Our proposal exploits frequency consistency among itemsets by constructing and optimizing a noisy FP-tree with LDP. Specifically, it works as follows. First, the most frequent items are identified, and the item domain is cut down accordingly. Second, the maximum level of the FP-tree is estimated. Third, a noisy FP-tree is constructed and optimized by using itemset frequency consistency, and then mined to obtain the k most frequent itemsets. Experimental results show that the LDP-FPMiner significantly improves over the state-of-the-art approach, SVSM, especially in the case of a high privacy level.