IPP: An Intelligent Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Detecting Interactions in Genome Association Studies

Analyzing K-order Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) interactions through the statistics of Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) is crucial for discovering pathogenic causes of human complex diseases and controlling risk genetic variants of diverse disorders. We propose a method based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm to detect gene interactions for GWAS - an Intelligent Privacy-Preserving scheme (IPP). Initially, we design a multi-objective search algorithm to discover the candidate SNP sets related to disease phenotype, which utilizes Differential Privacy (DP) method by disturbing the multi-objective function to construct a rational epistatic privacy protection strategy. Furthermore, the global path selection strategy composed of two probabilistic methods is proposed to reduce the probability of falling into the local optimum. We use simulated models and a real dataset of Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) to compare IPP with four popular methods to detect K-order SNPs, the experimental results show that IPP can guarantee the search accuracy effectively and enhance the detecting ability of various models. Further, the privacy budget experiments indicate that the range of privacy budget in IPP is reasonable and make the framework more stable.