Differential Privacy-enabled Federated Learning for Sensitive Health Data [article]

Olivia Choudhury, Aris Gkoulalas-Divanis, Theodoros Salonidis, Issa Sylla, Yoonyoung Park, Grace Hsu, Amar Das
2020 arXiv   pre-print
Leveraging real-world health data for machine learning tasks requires addressing many practical challenges, such as distributed data silos, privacy concerns with creating a centralized database from person-specific sensitive data, resource constraints for transferring and integrating data from multiple sites, and risk of a single point of failure. In this paper, we introduce a federated learning framework that can learn a global model from distributed health data held locally at different
more » ... The framework offers two levels of privacy protection. First, it does not move or share raw data across sites or with a centralized server during the model training process. Second, it uses a differential privacy mechanism to further protect the model from potential privacy attacks. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of our approach on two healthcare applications, using real-world electronic health data of 1 million patients. We demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the federated learning framework in offering an elevated level of privacy and maintaining utility of the global model.
arXiv:1910.02578v3 fatcat:7okfkjznyvb6fdway4attytbxe