To train sophisticated machine learning models one usually needs many training samples. Especially in healthcare settings these samples can be very expensive, meaning that one institution alone usually does not have enough on its own. Merging privacy-sensitive data from different sources is usually restricted by data security and data protection measures. This can lead to approaches that reduce data quality by putting noise onto the variables (e.g., in $ε$-differential privacy) or omitting certain values (e.g., for $k$-anonymity). Other measures based on cryptographic methods can lead to very time-consuming computations, which is especially problematic for larger multi-omics data. We address this problem by introducing ESCAPED, which stands for Efficient SeCure And PrivatE Dot product framework, enabling the computation of the dot product of vectors from multiple sources on a third-party, which later trains kernel-based machine learning algorithms, while neither sacrificing privacy nor adding noise. We evaluated our framework on drug resistance prediction for HIV-infected people and multi-omics dimensionality reduction and clustering problems in precision medicine. In terms of execution time, our framework significantly outperforms the best-fitting existing approaches without sacrificing the performance of the algorithm. Even though we only show the benefit for kernel-based algorithms, our framework can open up new research opportunities for further machine learning models that require the dot product of vectors from multiple sources.
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Northwestern University（西北大学）
Private multi-winner voting is the task of revealing $k$-hot binary vectors satisfying a bounded differential privacy (DP) guarantee. This task has been understudied in machine learning literature despite its prevalence in many domains such as healthcare. We propose three new DP multi-winner mechanisms: Binary, $τ$, and Powerset voting. Binary voting operates independently per label through composition. $τ$ voting bounds votes optimally in their $\ell_2$ norm for tight data-independent guarantees. Powerset voting operates over the entire binary vector by viewing the possible outcomes as a powe…
Differentially private federated learning with Byzantine-robust aggregation: A cross-domain framework for secure model training in banking and healthcare systems
Machine learning models benefit from large and diverse datasets. Using such datasets, however, often requires trusting a centralized data aggregator. For sensitive applications like healthcare and finance this is undesirable as it could compromise patient privacy or divulge trade secrets. Recent advances in secure and privacy-preserving computation, including trusted hardware enclaves and differential privacy, offer a way for mutually distrusting parties to efficiently train a machine learning model without revealing the training data. In this work, we introduce Myelin, a deep learning framewo…
Federated learning (FL) is getting increased attention for processing sensitive, distributed datasets common to domains such as healthcare. Instead of directly training classification models on these datasets, recent works have considered training data generators capable of synthesising a new dataset which is not protected by any privacy restrictions. Thus, the synthetic data can be made available to anyone, which enables further evaluation of machine learning architectures and research questions off-site. As an additional layer of privacy-preservation, differential privacy can be introduced i…
Differential Privacy-Driven Framework for Enhancing Heart Disease Prediction
School of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术学院）；Algoma University（阿尔戈马大学）；School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science（电气工程与计算机科学学院）；University of Ottawa（渥太华大学）
Differentially Private Synthetic Data Generation Using Context-Aware GANs
Computer Science The University of Texas at El Paso El Paso, US（计算机科学 德克萨斯理工大学埃尔帕索分校）；C.S.E.E. University of Maryland, Baltimore County Baltimore, US（计算机科学与工程系 马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）
Multi-Continental Healthcare Modelling Using Blockchain-Enabled Federated Learning
School of Computing, Newcastle University（新castle大学计算机学院）；Department of Computing, Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院计算机系）；Institute of Health Informatics, University College London（伦敦大学学院健康信息学研究所）；Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University（上海智能自主系统研究所，同济大学）；College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学电子与信息工程学院）；University College London Hospital（伦敦大学学院医院）
University of Massachusetts, Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
Federated Learning (FL) is a concept first introduced by Google in 2016, in which multiple devices collaboratively learn a machine learning model without sharing their private data under the supervision of a central server. This offers ample opportunities in critical domains such as healthcare, finance etc, where it is risky to share private user information to other organisations or devices. While FL appears to be a promising Machine Learning (ML) technique to keep the local data private, it is also vulnerable to attacks like other ML models. Given the growing interest in the FL domain, this …
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Northwestern University（西北大学）
Machine learning benefits from large training datasets, which may not always be possible to collect by any single entity, especially when using privacy-sensitive data. In many contexts, such as healthcare and finance, separate parties may wish to collaborate and learn from each other's data but are prevented from doing so due to privacy regulations. Some regulations prevent explicit sharing of data between parties by joining datasets in a central location (confidentiality). Others also limit implicit sharing of data, e.g., through model predictions (privacy). There is currently no method that …
Weill Cornell Medicine（威尔康奈尔医学院）；Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai（西奈山伊坎医学院）；U.S. Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center（美国国防部联合人工智能中心）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）
With the rapid development of computer software and hardware technologies, more and more healthcare data are becoming readily available from clinical institutions, patients, insurance companies and pharmaceutical industries, among others. This access provides an unprecedented opportunity for data science technologies to derive data-driven insights and improve the quality of care delivery. Healthcare data, however, are usually fragmented and private making it difficult to generate robust results across populations. For example, different hospitals own the electronic health records (EHR) of diff…
University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Over the years, the popularity and usage of wearable Internet of Things (IoT) devices in several healthcare services are increased. Among the services that benefit from the usage of such devices is predictive analysis, which can improve early diagnosis in e-health. However, due to the limitations of wearable IoT devices, challenges in data privacy, service integrity, and network structure adaptability arose. To address these concerns, we propose a platform using federated learning and private blockchain technology within a fog-IoT network. These technologies have privacy-preserving features se…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis（美国经济分析局）
Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects in domains such as healthcare or social science often involves sensitive data where protecting privacy is important. We introduce a general meta-algorithm for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATE) with differential privacy (DP) guarantees. Our meta-algorithm can work with simple, single-stage CATE estimators such as S-learner and more complex multi-stage estimators such as DR and R-learner. We perform a tight privacy analysis by taking advantage of sample splitting in our meta-algorithm and the parallel composition property of differ…
Healthcare IoMT systems are becoming intelligent, miniaturized, and more integrated into daily life. As for the distributed devices in the IoMT, federated learning has become a topical area with cloud-based training procedures when meeting data security. However, the distribution of IoMT has the risk of protection from data poisoning attacks. Poisoned data can be fabricated by falsifying medical data, which urges a security defense to IoMT systems. Due to the lack of specific labels, the filtering of malicious data is a unique unsupervised scenario. One of the main challenges is finding robust…
Differentially Private Pre-Trained Model Fusion using Decentralized Federated Graph Matching
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Changsha Aier Eye Hospital（长沙爱尔眼科医院）；Nanchang Aier Eye Hospital（南昌爱尔眼科医院）
To address COVID-19 healthcare challenges, we need frequent sharing of health data, knowledge and resources at a global scale. However, in this digital age, data privacy is a big concern that requires the secure embedding of privacy assurance into the design of all technological solutions that use health data. In this paper, we introduce differential privacy by design (dPbD) framework and discuss its embedding into the federated machine learning system. To limit the scope of our paper, we focus on the problem scenario of COVID-19 imaging data privacy for disease diagnosis by computer vision an…
FAIRPLAI: A Human-in-the-Loop Approach to Fair and Private Machine Learning
Dept. of Computer Science, The University of Texas at El Paso（得克萨斯大学埃尔帕索分校计算机科学系）；Dept. of Mathematics, Mountain View High School（山景高中数学系）；Dept. of Mathematics, El Paso Independent School District（埃尔帕索独立学区数学系）
Manipal Institute of Technology（马尼帕尔理工学院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；OpenMined；Yildiz Technical University（耶尔德兹技术大学）；Ford Motor Company（福特汽车公司）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques can be applied to help with the diagnosis of medical conditions such as depression, using a collection of a person's utterances. Depression is a serious medical illness that can have adverse effects on how one feels, thinks, and acts, which can lead to emotional and physical problems. Due to the sensitive nature of such data, privacy measures need to be taken for handling and training models with such data. In this work, we study the effects that the application of Differential Privacy (DP) has, in both a centralized and a Federated Learning (FL) se…
The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；University of Warwick（华威大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）；University of Leeds（利兹大学）；DFKI（德国人工智能研究中心）
Synthetic datasets are often presented as a silver-bullet solution to the problem of privacy-preserving data publishing. However, for many applications, synthetic data has been shown to have limited utility when used to train predictive models. One promising potential application of these data is in the exploratory phase of the machine learning workflow, which involves understanding, engineering and selecting features. This phase often involves considerable time, and depends on the availability of data. There would be substantial value in synthetic data that permitted these steps to be carried…
Achieving Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Under Rényi Differential Privacy for Fair and Private Data Generation
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science University of Southern Denmark（丹麦南部大学数学与计算机科学系）；Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Freie Universität Berlin（柏林自由大学数学与计算机科学系）；Faculty for Informatik Universität der Bundeswehr München（联邦国防军大学慕尼黑信息学院）
University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming increasingly popular and are influencing many application domains such as healthcare and transportation. These devices are used for real-world applications such as sensor monitoring, real-time control. In this work, we look at differentially private (DP) neural network (NN) based network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) to detect intrusion attacks on networks of such IoT devices. Existing NN training solutions in this domain either ignore privacy considerations or assume that the privacy requirements are homogeneous across all users. We show that…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Maynooth University（梅努斯大学）
Balancing privacy and predictive utility remains a central challenge for machine learning in healthcare. In this paper, we develop Syfer, a neural obfuscation method to protect against re-identification attacks. Syfer composes trained layers with random neural networks to encode the original data (e.g. X-rays) while maintaining the ability to predict diagnoses from the encoded data. The randomness in the encoder acts as the private key for the data owner. We quantify privacy as the number of attacker guesses required to re-identify a single image (guesswork). We propose a contrastive learning …
Reinforcement learning algorithms are known to be sample inefficient, and often performance on one task can be substantially improved by leveraging information (e.g., via pre-training) on other related tasks. In this work, we propose a technique to achieve such knowledge transfer in cases where agent trajectories contain sensitive or private information, such as in the healthcare domain. Our approach leverages a differentially private policy evaluation algorithm to initialize an actor-critic model and improve the effectiveness of learning in downstream tasks. We empirically show this technique…
Motivated by personalized healthcare and other applications involving sensitive data, we study online exploration in reinforcement learning with differential privacy (DP) constraints. Existing work on this problem established that no-regret learning is possible under joint differential privacy (JDP) and local differential privacy (LDP) but did not provide an algorithm with optimal regret. We close this gap for the JDP case by designing an $ε$-JDP algorithm with a regret of $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{SAH^2T}+S^2AH^3/ε)$ which matches the information-theoretic lower bound of non-private learning for a…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
Neural networks pose a privacy risk to training data due to their propensity to memorise and leak information. Focusing on image classification, we show that neural networks also unintentionally memorise unique features even when they occur only once in training data. An example of a unique feature is a person's name that is accidentally present on a training image. Assuming access to the inputs and outputs of a trained model, the domain of the training data, and knowledge of unique features, we develop a score estimating the model's sensitivity to a unique feature by comparing the KL divergen…
Snap Inc.（斯纳普公司）；University of South Florida（南佛罗里达大学）
Deep learning often requires a large amount of data. In real-world applications, e.g., healthcare applications, the data collected by a single organization (e.g., hospital) is often limited, and the majority of massive and diverse data is often segregated across multiple organizations. As such, it motivates the researchers to conduct distributed deep learning, where the data user would like to build DL models using the data segregated across multiple different data owners. However, this could lead to severe privacy concerns due to the sensitive nature of the data, thus the data owners would be…
Decentralised, Collaborative, and Privacy-preserving Machine Learning for Multi-Hospital Data
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；University Health Network（大学健康网络）；Vector Institute（矢量研究所）；CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security（CISPA亥姆霍兹信息安全中心）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）；St. Michael’s Hospital（圣迈克尔医院）；Unity Health Toronto（多伦多团结医疗）；Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto（多伦多大学卫生政策、管理与评价研究所）；Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto（多伦多大学特梅蒂医学院）
