A VPA algorithm is proposed to mining the association rules in the privacy preserving data mining, where data is vertically partitioned. The VSS protocol was used to encrypt the vertically data, which was owned by different parties. And the private comparing protocol was adopted to generate the frequent itemset. In VPA the ID numbers of the recordings were employed to keep the consistency of the data among different parties, which were saved in ID index array. The VPA algorithm can generate association rules without violating the privacy. The performance of the scheme is validated against representative real and synthetic datasets. The results reveal that the VPA algorithm can do the same in finding frequent itemset and generating the consistent rules, as it did in Apriori algorithm, in which the data were vertically partitioned and totally encrypted.
