Improved privacy preserving method for periodical SRS publishing

PLoS One. 2021 Apr 22;16(4):e0250457. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0250457. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Spontaneous reporting systems (SRSs) are used to collect adverse drug events (ADEs) for their evaluation and analysis. Periodical SRS data publication gives rise to a problem where sensitive, private data can be discovered through various attacks. The existing SRS data publishing methods are vulnerable to Medicine Discontinuation Attack(MD-attack) and Substantial symptoms-attack(SS-attack). To remedy this problem, an improved periodical SRS data publishing-PPMS(k, θ, ɑ)-bounding is proposed. This new method can recognize MD-attack by ensuring that each equivalence group contains at least k new medicine discontinuation records. The SS-attack can be thwarted using a heuristic algorithm. Theoretical analysis indicates that PPMS(k, θ, ɑ)-bounding can thwart the above-mentioned attacks. The experimental results also demonstrate that PPMS(k, θ, ɑ)-bounding can provide much better protection for privacy than the existing method and the new method dose not increase the information loss. PPMS(k, θ, ɑ)-bounding can improve the privacy, guaranteeing the information usability of the released tables.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting Systems / trends*
  • Algorithms
  • Humans
  • Interior Design and Furnishings / methods
  • Medical Records*
  • Privacy*
  • Research Design
  • Serial Publications / trends*

Associated data

  • figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.14269244

Grants and funding

This paper is partly supported by “Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities” 、Doctoral research start-up fund of Guangxi Normal University(RZ1900006676)” and “The project of improving the basic scientific research ability of young and middle-aged teachers in Guangxi Universities(2020KY020323)”. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.