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Title: Differentially Private Survival Function Estimation

Paper content:
Survival function estimation is used in many disciplines, but it is most common in medical analytics in the form of the Kaplan-Meier estimator.
Sensitive data (patient records) is used in the estimation without any explicit control on the information leakage, which is a significant privacy concern.
We propose a first differentially private estimator of the survival function and show that it can be easily extended to provide differentially private confidence intervals and test statistics without spending any extra privacy budget.
We further provide extensions for differentially private estimation of the competing risk cumulative incidence function.
Using nine real-life clinical datasets, we provide empirical evidence that our proposed method provides good utility while simultaneously providing strong privacy guarantees.
A patient progresses from HIV infection to AIDS after 4.5 years.
A study using the patient's data publishes the survival function estimates (a standard practice in clinical research).
An adversary, with only access to the published estimates (even in the form of survival function plots), can reconstruct user-level data (Wei & Royston, 2018; Fredrikson et al., 2014) .
Effectively leading to the disclosure of sensitive information.
This is just one scenario.
The survival function is used for modeling any time to an event, taking into account that some subjects will not experience the event at the time of data collection.
The survival function is used in many domains, some examples are the duration of unemployment (in economics); time until the failure of a machine part (in engineering); time to disease recurrence, time to infection, time to death (in healthcare); etc.
Our personal healthcare information is the most sensitive private attribute, protected by law, violations of which carry severe penalties.
And as the initial example suggests, of all application areas, information leakage in the healthcare domain is the most serious issue and is our focus in this study.
For estimation of the survival function, we focus on the Kaplan-Meier's (KM) (Kaplan & Meier, 1958) non-parametric method.
KM's method is ubiquitous in clinical research.
A quick search of the term on PubMed 1 yields 109,421 results.
It is not an overstatement to say that almost every clinical study uses KM's method to report summary statistics on their cohort's survival.
Statistical agencies around the world use this method to report on the survival of the general population or specific disease-related survival estimates.
To best of our knowledge, there does not exist any model that can provide formal privacy guarantees for estimation of survival function using the KM method.
The only related work is by Nguyên & Hui (2017) , which uses the output and objective perturbation for regression modeling of discrete time to event data.
The approach is limited to "multivariate" regression models and cannot be directly used to estimate survival function in a differentially private fashion.
One can argue that generative models such as the differentially private generative adversarial networks (Xie et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2018; Triastcyn & Faltings, 2018; Beaulieu-Jones et al., 2017; Yoon et al., 2019) can be trained to generate differentially private synthetic data.
Which can then be used to estimate the survival function.
But, GANs do not generalize well to the datasets typically encountered for our use-case (very small sample size (can be less than a hundred), highly constrained dimensionality (d ∈ [2, 3] ), a mixture of categorical and continuous variables, no data pre-processing allowed, etc.
).
We propose the first differentially private method for estimating the survival function based on the KM method.
Grounded by the core principles of differential privacy, our method guarantees the differentially private estimation of the survival function.
Also, we show that our method easily extends to provide differentially private confidence intervals and differentially private test statistics (for comparison of survival function between multiple groups) without any extra privacy cost.
We further extend our method for differentially private estimation of the competing risk cumulative incidence function (another popular estimate in clinical research).
Using nine real-life clinical datasets, we provide empirical evidence that our proposed method provides good utility while simultaneously providing strong privacy guarantees.
Lastly, we release our method as an R 2 (R Core Team, 2018) package for rapid accessibility and adoption.
We have presented the first method for differentially private estimation of the survival function and we have shown that our proposed method can be easily extended to differentially private estimation of "other" often used statistics such as the associated confidence intervals, test statistics, and the competing risk cumulative incidence.
With extensive empirical evaluation on nine real-life datasets, we have shown that our proposed method provides good privacy-utility trade-off.

assistant: text: A first differentially private estimate of the survival function