How Reliable Is Your Outsourcing Service for Data Mining? A Metamorphic Method for Verifying the Result Integrity.

Association rules mining is an important and classic research topic in Data Mining, and has been widely applied in many real-life cases. The primary time and memory consumption in association rules mining is from its first step - frequent itemsets mining. With the development of cloud computing, outsourcing this task to third-party service providers will save efforts in system development, deployment, operation, etc. Outsourcing, however, actually brings risks and difficulties in verifying the results returned by these services. In this paper, we focus on verifying the integrity of the results returned by outsourcing services. We propose a metamorphic-based method, which is light-weight and requires not much complicated process. The key point of our method is the construction of a set of metamorphic relations (MRs). Through analysis and experimental research, we show that our approach delivers quite satisfactory results.