The right to be forgotten: Towards Machine Learning on perturbed knowledge bases

Today’s increasingly complex information infrastructures represent the basis of any data-driven industries which are rapidly becoming the 21st century’s economic backbone. The sensitivity of those infrastructures to disturbances in their knowledge bases is therefore of crucial interest for companies, organizations, customers and regulating bodies. This holds true with respect to the direct provisioning of such information in crucial applications like clinical settings or the energy industry, but also when considering additional insights, predictions and personalized services that are enabled by the automatic processing of those data. In the light of new EU Data Protection regulations applying from 2018 onwards which give customers the right to have their data deleted on request, information processing bodies will have to react to these changing jurisdictional (and therefore economic) conditions. Their choices include a re-design of their data infrastructure as well as preventive actions like anonymization of databases per default. Therefore, insights into the effects of perturbed / anonymized knowledge bases on the quality of machine learning results are a crucial basis for successfully facing those future challenges. In this paper we introduce a series of experiments we conducted on applying four different classifiers to an established dataset, as well as several distorted versions of it and present our initial results