Privacy-Preserving Decision Tree Learning with Boolean Target Class

Abstract

This paper studies a privacy-preserving decision tree learning protocol (PPDT) for vertically partitioned datasets. In vertically partitioned datasets, a single class (target) attribute is shared by both parities or carefully treated by either party in existing studies. The proposed scheme allows both parties to have independent class attributes in a secure way and to combine multiple class attributes in arbitrary boolean function, which gives parties some flexibility in data-mining. Our proposed PPDT protocol reduces the CPU-intensive computation of logarithms by approximating with a piecewise linear function defined by light-weight fundamental operations of addition and constant multiplication so that information gain for attributes can be evaluated in a secure function evaluation scheme. Using the UCI Machine Learning dataset and a synthesized dataset, the proposed protocol is evaluated in terms of its accuracy and the sizes of trees^*.