Privacy Preserving Distributed Association Rule Mining Approach on Vertically Partitioned Healthcare Data

Abstract

The trends of data mining in the healthcare is increased due to the digitization of healthcare with electronic health record (EHR) systems. This generates a huge amount of data on daily basis. Data mining with the healthcare data has given the new direction to medical research for early detection of diseases and improving patient care. Many data mining applications require the integration of data from the different sources. For example, the integration of outpatient medical records and health examination data helps to identify the correlation between abnormal test result and disease. The result of association rule mining on this integrated data helps to build the knowledge center for disease prevention, which facilitate the healthcare provider in follow up treatment and prevention. The integration of data requires the sharing of sensitive information about the patients. Disclosing the sensitive information violates the privacy of patients. In this paper, we tackle the problem of privacy preserving association rule mining in vertically partition healthcare data. Furthermore, we analyze the proposed approach in terms of privacy preservation, communication and computation cost.