Fast Fourier Transform Based Data Perturbation Method for Privacy Protection

Privacy preservation is a major concern in the application of data mining techniques to counterterrorism and homeland security. Data distortion is a critical component to preserve privacy in security-related data mining applications. We propose a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) based method for data distortion, and compare it with the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based method. The experimental results show that the FFT based method can obtain similar performance as SVD based method in preserving privacy as well as maintaining utility of the datasets, however, the computational time used by the FFT based method is much less than the SVD based method. We conclude that the FFT based method is a very promising data distortion method.