At What Price? Exploring the Potential and Challenges of Differentially Private Machine Learning for Healthcare

Abstract

The increased generation of data has become one of the main drivers of technological innovation in healthcare. This applies in particular to the adoption of Machine Learning models that are used to generate value from the growing available healthcare data. However, the increased processing of sensitive healthcare data comes with challenges in terms of data privacy. Differential privacy, the method of adding randomness to the data to increase privacy, has gained popularity in the last few years as a possible solution. However, while the addition of randomness increases privacy, it also reduces overall model performance, generating a privacy-utility trade-off. Examining this trade-off, we contribute to the literature by providing an empirical paper that experimentally evaluates two prominent and innovative methods of differentially private Machine Learning on medical image and text data to deepen the understanding of the existing potential and challenges of such methods for the healthcare domain.