Differentially private distributed logistic regression using private and public data

Abstract

Background: Privacy protecting is an important issue in medical informatics and differential privacy is a state-of-the-art framework for data privacy research. Differential privacy offers provable privacy against attackers who have auxiliary information, and can be applied to data mining models (for example, logistic regression). However, differentially private methods sometimes introduce too much noise and make outputs less useful. Given available public data in medical research (e.g. from patients who sign open-consent agreements), we can design algorithms that use both public and private data sets to decrease the amount of noise that is introduced. Methodology. In this paper, we modify the update step in Newton-Raphson method to propose a differentially private distributed logistic regression model based on both public and private data. Experiments and results. We try our algorithm on three different data sets, and show its advantage over: (1) a logistic regression model based solely on public data, and (2) a differentially private distributed logistic regression model based on private data under various scenarios. Conclusion: Logistic regression models built with our new algorithm based on both private and public datasets demonstrate better utility than models that trained on private or public datasets alone without sacrificing the rigorous privacy guarantee. © 2014 Ji et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.