Privacy Preserving Feature Selection for Vertically Distributed Medical Data based on Genetic Algorithms and Naïve Bayes

Machine learning is a powerful tool to mine useful knowledge from vast databases. Many establishments in the medical area such as hospitals, laboratories want to join their efforts with the ambition to extract models that are more accurate. However, this approach faces problems. Due to the laws protecting patient privacy or other similar concerns, parties are reluctant to share their data. In vast amounts of data, which are useful and pertinent in constructing accurate data mining models? In this article, the researchers deal with these challenges for vertically distributed medical data. They propose an original secure wrapper solution to perform feature selection based on genetic algorithms and distributed Naïve Bayes. Contrary to the previous solutions, the original data is not perturbed. Therefore, the data utility and performance are preserved. They prove that the proposed solution selects relevant attributes to increase performance, preserving patient privacy.