Privacy-preserving association rule mining for horizontally partitioned healthcare data: a case study on the heart diseases

Abstract

In recent years, a trend of electronic health record (EHR) system can be seen increasingly in the hospitals, which has generated huge amount of electronically stored data of patients. Association rule mining technique is very helpful in the numerous applications of healthcare (e.g., correlation between disease and symptoms, disease and offering effective treatment and predicting risks of disease based on the historical data, etc.). The data collected by an EHR system are very important for the medical research. Currently, a patient health report is derived on the basis of a physician’s own experience and on the association rule mining results of a local EHR system maintained by a particular hospital. Association rule mining results will be more accurate if the data of all local EHR systems are integrated and association rule mining is performed. Integration of local EHR systems requires the sharing of local EHR data. Sharing of patient records violates the privacy of patients. Hence, medical research is focused on the problem of mining association rules without sharing of local private EHR data. Privacy-preserving distributed association rule mining (PPDARM) solves this issue by mining the association rules while preserving the privacy of patients. In this paper, an approach for the PPDARM is proposed for collaboratively performing association rule mining by all local EHR systems while preserving the privacy. The proposed approach is also analysed with the heart disease dataset.