PC4PM: A Tool for Privacy/Confidentiality Preservation in Process Mining
This project implements a web-based tool for Privacy/Confidentiality-Preserving Data Publishing (PPDP) in process mining. PC4PM is witten in Python using Django framework.
At the moment, the tool has eight main Django applications:
Event data management
In this application, you can upload and manage your event data. Both standard XES event logs and non-standard event data, so-called Event Log Abstraction (ELA), resulting from some privacy preservation techniques can be handeled in this module.
This application implements the decomposition method proposed in the paper Mining Roles From Event Logs While Preserving Privacy. The result of applying this technique to an event log is another event log which preserves the data utility for mining roles (similar task social networks) based on the resource and activity information without revealing who performs what.
This application implements the TLKC-privacy model proposed in the paper TLKC-Privacy Model for Process Mining. This privacy model provides group-based privacy guarantees assuming four types of background knowledge: set, multiset, sequence, and relative. T refers to the accuracy of timestamps in the privacy-aware event log, L refers to the power of background knowledge, K refers to the k in the k-anonymity privacy model, and C refers to the bound of confidence regarding the sensitive attribute values in an equivalence class. Applying this method results in a privacy-aware event log in the XES format that preserves data utility for process discovery and performance analysis.
The extended version of TLKC-privacy provides the same type of guarantees as the main algorithm for more aspects of event data.
The extended version of TLKC-privacy covers all the main perspectives of process mining including control-flow, time, case, and organizational perspectives. It empowers the adjustability of the proposed technique by adding new parameters to adjust privacy guarantees and the loss of accuracy.
This application implements the main anonymization operations listed in the paper Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing in Process Mining.
The implemented anonymization operations are suppression, addition, condensation, swapping, generalization, cryptography, and substitution.
This application implements the notion of differential privacy to provide privacy guarantees for event logs, proposed in the paper PRIPEL: Privacy-Preserving Event Log Publishing Including Contextual Information.
PRIPEL is an external library for our tool. It has been integrated as an example external library to show this feature of the tool.
PC4PM supports users with a user guide for choosing the right techniques based on their requirements.
Multi-processing option has been provided as a parameter for all the time-consuming functions, which is enabled by default.
Help tooltips are also provided for the parameters of each technique.
Each privacy preservation technique in the tool is implemented as a Django application that enables the simultaneous running of different techniques on an event log.
New techniques can simply be integrated as independent applications.
The outputs for the privacy preservation techniques are provided independently for each technique and can be downloaded or stored in the event data repository.
The tool is designed in a way that provides a cycle of privacy preservation techniques, i.e., the privacy-aware event data, added to the event data repository, can be set as the input for the techniques again as long as they are in the form of standard XES event logs.
To keep the process analysts aware of the modifications applied to the privacy-aware event logs, the privacy metadata specify the order of the applied privacy preservation techniques.
A naming approach is followed to uniquely identify the privacy-aware event data based on the name of the technique, the creation time, and the name of the event log.
In this video, you can watch a screencast of the tool which demonstrates the main functionalities of PC4PM. Note that you may need to download the file to watch.
To simplify the usage, and to run the appication without going throgh the installation phase, a Docker container has been provide that can be run on your local system using the following docker commands:
docker pull m4jid/pc4pm
docker run -d -p 8000:8000 m4jid/pc4pm
Note that for using docker commands, first you need to install Docker accourding to your operation system.
After running the docker, use your browser and enter the following address to run the web-based application:
http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Some of the introduced privacy preservation techniques have also been integrated into PM4Py-WS (PMTK) as an open-source web-based
application for process mining. Where process mining algorithms can directly be applied to the privacy-aware event logs. Use the following docker commands to run this application:
docker pull m4jid/pm4pyws:privacyIntegration
docker run -d -p 5000:80 m4jid/pm4pyws:privacyIntegration
After running the docker, use your browser and enter the following address to run the web-based application:
http://127.0.0.1:5000/index.html