Privacy-aware filter-based feature selection

A large amount of digital information collected and stored in databases creates new opportunities for knowledge discovery and data mining. The datasets, however, may contain personally identifiable information that needs to be protected. With high dimensionality of many large datasets, dimensionality reduction such as feature selection becomes indispensible. In this work, we aim at incorporating privacy into the very process of feature selection and as such, propose a privacy-aware filter-based feature selection method (PF-IFR). Our method enables data custodians to define a trade-off measure for controlling the amount of privacy and efficacy using filter-based feature selection techniques.