Enhancing privacy protection of physical examination data through synthetic algorithms based on differential privacy

Health physical examinations play a crucial role in early detection of cancer and chronic disease. However, privacy concerns limit the utilization of this kind of data for health interventions and research. Synthetic data methods based on differential privacy are increasingly used to create complete datasets that protect privacy while enabling data analysis and result interpretation. Hence, the use of synthetic algorithms based on differential privacy for privacy protection of physical examination data is a promising research direction.

Three synthetic algorithms, PrivBayes, PeGS, and DP-Gibbs were used to generate complete synthetic datasets that adhere to differential privacy standards using physical examination data composed of categorical data, which compared with the existing algorithm Private-PGM.

Compared with the existing algorithm, DP-Gibbs can provide privacy preserving capacity of 4.686 (ε = 0.5), while the existing algorithm only with 2.012. In addition, DP-Gibbs provides 0.620 of precision, 0.539 of F1-score, 0.342 of Kappa Coefficient, and 0.765 of AUC-score. The corresponding statistical results of existing algorithm are 0.520, 0.321, 0.188 and 0.695.

The main contributions of this study are the exploration of combination models incorporating different noise forms and Bayesian synthetic algorithms, alongside a comparative analysis against existing algorithms. This study explored the balance between privacy protection and data utility under different levels of privacy protection, and DP-Gibbs offers more stable technical support for de-identifying physical examination data prior to sharing and analysis, which realized the mining and application of a wider range of medical data under the requirements of privacy protection. By leveraging this effective privacy protection technique, clinical researchers can extract valuable insights on diseases and population health from the physical examination data without the risk of leaking private information.