Abstract:
Reluctance of statistical agencies and other data owners to share their possibly confidential or proprietary data with others who own related databases is a serious impediment to conducting mutually beneficial analyses. In this paper, we propose a protocol for securely computing matrix products in vertically partitioned data, i.e., the data sets have the same subjects but disjoint attributes. This protocol allows data owners to estimate coefficients and standard errors of linear regressions, and to examine regression model diagnostics, without disclosing the values of their attributes to each other or to third parties. The protocol can be used to perform other procedures for which sample means and covariances are sufficient statistics.
tr145.pdf