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Synthetic data generation has been widely adopted in software testing, data privacy, imbalanced learning, machine learning explanation, etc. In such contexts, it is important to generate data samples located within “local” areas surrounding specific instances. Local synthetic data can help the learning phase of predictive models, and it is fundamental for methods explaining the local behavior of obscure classifiers. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we introduce a method based on generative operators allowing the synthetic neighborhood generation by applying specific perturbations on a given input instance. The key factor consists in performing a data transformation that makes applicable to any type of data, i.e., data-agnostic. Second, we design a framework for evaluating the goodness of local synthetic neighborhoods exploiting both supervised and unsupervised methodologies. A deep experimentation shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.

With the advent of cloud computing and its model for IT services based on the Internet and big data centers, the interest of industries into XaaS ("Anything as a Service") paradigm is increasing. Business intelligence and knowledge discovery services are typical services that companies tend to externalize on the cloud, due to their data intensive nature and the algorithms complexity. What is appealing for a company is to rely on external expertise and infrastructure to compute the analytical results and models which are required by the business analysts for understanding the business phenomena under observation. Although it is advantageous to achieve sophisticated analysis there exist several serious privacy issues in this paradigm. In this paper we investigate through an industrial use-case the application of a framework for privacypreserving outsourcing of pattern mining on event-log data. Moreover, we present and discuss some ideas about possible extensions.

Data mining is gaining momentum in society due to the ever increasing availability of large amounts of data, easily gathered by a variety of collection technologies and stored via computer systems. Due to the limited computational resources of data owners and the developments in cloud computing, there has been considerable recent interest in the paradigm of data mining-as-a-service (DMaaS). In this paradigm, a company (data owner) lacking in expertise or computational resources outsources its mining needs to a third party service provider (server). Given the fact that the server may not be fully trusted, one of the main concerns of the DMaaS paradigm is the protection of data privacy. In this paper, we provide an overview of a variety of techniques and approaches that address the privacy issues of the DMaaS paradigm.