Privacy Preservation through Random Nonlinear Distortion

Privacy-preserving data mining aims to solve this problem by randomly transforming the data prior to their release to the data miners. Previous works only considered the case of linear data perturbations - additive, multiplicative, or a combination of both - for studying the usefulness of the perturbed output.

In this paper, we discuss nonlinear data distortion using potentially nonlinear random data transformation and show how it can be useful for privacy-preserving anomaly detection from sensitive data sets. We develop bounds on the expected accuracy of the nonlinear distortion and also quantify privacy by using standard definitions. The highlight of this approach is to allow a user to control the amount of privacy by varying the degree of nonlinearity.