Purpose Association rule mining generates the patterns and correlations from the database, which requires large scanning time, and the cost of computation associated with the generation of the rules is quite high. On the other hand, the candidate rules generated using the traditional association rules mining face a huge challenge in terms of time and space, and the process is lengthy. In order to tackle the issues of the existing methods and to render the privacy rules, the paper proposes the grid-based privacy association rule mining. Design/methodology/approach The primary intention of the research is to design and develop a distributed elephant herding optimization (EHO) for grid-based privacy association rule mining from the database. The proposed method of rule generation is processed as two steps: in the first step, the rules are generated using apriori algorithm, which is the effective association rule mining algorithm. In general, the extraction of the association rules from the input database is based on confidence and support that is replaced with new terms, such as probability-based confidence and holo-entropy. Thus, in the proposed model, the extraction of the association rules is based on probability-based confidence and holo-entropy. In the second step, the generated rules are given to the grid-based privacy rule mining, which produces privacy-dependent rules based on a novel optimization algorithm and grid-based fitness. The novel optimization algorithm is developed by integrating the distributed concept in EHO algorithm. Findings The experimentation of the method using the databases taken from the Frequent Itemset Mining Dataset Repository to prove the effectiveness of the distributed grid-based privacy association rule mining includes the retail, chess, T10I4D100K and T40I10D100K databases. The proposed method outperformed the existing methods through offering a higher degree of privacy and utility, and moreover, it is noted that the distributed nature of the association rule mining facilitates the parallel processing and generates the privacy rules without much computational burden. The rate of hiding capacity, the rate of information preservation and rate of the false rules generated for the proposed method are found to be 0.4468, 0.4488 and 0.0654, respectively, which is better compared with the existing rule mining methods. Originality/value Data mining is performed in a distributed manner through the grids that subdivide the input data, and the rules are framed using the apriori-based association mining, which is the modification of the standard apriori with the holo-entropy and probability-based confidence replacing the support and confidence in the standard apriori algorithm. The mined rules do not assure the privacy, and hence, the grid-based privacy rules are employed that utilize the adaptive elephant herding optimization (AEHO) for generating the privacy rules. The AEHO inherits the adaptive nature in the standard EHO, which renders the global optimal solution.
