Natural language processing on encrypted patient data

While many industries can benefit from machine learning techniques for data analysis, they often do not have the technical expertise nor computational power to do so. Therefore, many organizations would benefit from outsourcing their data analysis. Yet, stringent data privacy policies prevent outsourcing sensitive data and may stop the delegation of data analysis in its tracks. In this thesis, we put forth a two-party system where one party capable of powerful computation can run certain machine learning algorithms from the natural language processing domain on the second party's data, where the first party is limited to learning only specific functions of the second party's data and nothing else. Our system provides simple cryptographic schemes for locating keywords, matching approximate regular expressions, and computing frequency analysis on encrypted data. We present a full implementation of this system in the form of a extendible software library and a command line interface. Finally, we discuss a medical case study where we used our system to run a suite of unmodified machine learning algorithms on encrypted free text patient notes.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Grinman, Alex J

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Shafi Goldwasser.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113438

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/113438