Obfuscating a Net

If the protection of intellectual property, or proprietary or classified information is a concern for you, Netica has the ability to obfuscate your net and to work with encrypted Bayes nets.  The semantic content of the net is retained, so inference results will not be affected.

How To:  If you are going to send the net to someone else, but it has proprietary information that you don't want to reveal to other users, choose Modify Obfuscate net.  A new window will open with the obfuscated net.  If you select nodes before you obfuscate, it will only apply to those nodes.  If no nodes are selected, it will apply to the entire net.

Action:  All identifying information associated with the net (including node name, node title, node comment, state name, state title, state comment, net title, net comment, net file name, link names, node-set names) will be removed or converted into non-identifying labels.

XRef Report:  These changes are logged into the Messages window for future reference, called a cross reference report.  If you wish to paste these results into an Excel spreadsheet, select the text in the cross reference report (excluding the report heading) and choose Modify Tabify Selection, then press ctrl+c to copy the table.  In an Excel workbook, press ctrl+v to paste the table.

You can use the cross reference report as a key to translate between the full net and the obfuscated net.  For instance, if the obfuscated net is to be part of a package containing software that uses Netica API to read in the net, enter some findings and perform some queries, then the key will contain the information needed to convert the familiar names to the ones needed by Netica API.

Encryption:  Another way to protect or hide the information in a Bayes net, is to use Netica's encryption capability.  In fact, a net can be both obfuscated and encrypted.