Local Differential Privacy in the Medical Domain to Protect Sensitive Information: Algorithm Development and Real-World Validation.

backgroundPrivacy is of increasing interest in the present big data era, particularly the privacy of medical data. Specifically, differential privacy has emerged as the standard method for preservation of privacy during data analysis and publishing.

objectiveUsing machine learning techniques, we applied differential privacy to medical data with diverse parameters and checked the feasibility of our algorithms with synthetic data as well as the balance between data privacy and utility.

methodsAll data were normalized to a range between -1 and 1, and the bounded Laplacian method was applied to prevent the generation of out-of-bound values after applying the differential privacy algorithm. To preserve the cardinality of the categorical variables, we performed postprocessing via discretization. The algorithm was evaluated using both synthetic and real-world data (from the eICU Collaborative Research Database). We evaluated the difference between the original data and the perturbated data using misclassification rates and the mean squared error for categorical data and continuous data, respectively. Further, we compared the performance of classification models that predict in-hospital mortality using real-world data.

resultsThe misclassification rate of categorical variables ranged between 0.49 and 0.85 when the value of ε was 0.1, and it converged to 0 as ε increased. When ε was between 10

conclusionsWe applied local differential privacy to medical domain data, which are diverse and high dimensional. Higher noise may offer enhanced privacy, but it simultaneously hinders utility. We should choose an appropriate degree of noise for data perturbation to balance privacy and utility depending on specific situations.