A Secure High-Order Gene Interaction Detecting Method for Infectious Diseases

Infectious diseases pose a serious threat to human life, the Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) can analyze susceptibility genes of infectious diseases from the genetic level and carry out targeted prevention and treatment. The susceptibility genes for infectious diseases often act in combination with multiple susceptibility sites; therefore, high-order epistasis detection has become an important means. However, due to intensive computational burden and diversity of disease models, existing methods have drawbacks on low detection power, high computation cost, and preference for some types of disease models. Furthermore, these methods are exposed to repeated query and model inversion attacks in the process of iterative optimization, which may disclose Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) information associated with individual privacy. Therefore, in order to solve these problems, this paper proposed a safe harmony search algorithm for high-order gene interaction detection, termed as HS-DP. Firstly, the linear weighting method was used to integrate 5 objective functions to screen out high-order SNP sets with high correlation, including K2-Score, JS divergence, logistic regression, mutual information, and Gini. Then, based on the Differential Privacy (DP) theory, the function disturbance mechanism was introduced to protect the security of individual privacy information associated with the objective function, and we proved the rationality of the disturbance mechanism theoretically. Finally, the practicability and superiority of the algorithm were verified by experiments. Experimental results showed that the algorithm proposed in this paper could improve the detection accuracy to the greatest extent while guaranteeing privacy.