Privacy-preserving decision trees over vertically partitioned data

Privacy and security concerns can prevent sharing of data, derailing data-mining projects. Distributed knowledge discovery, if done correctly, can alleviate this problem. We introduce a generalized privacy-preserving variant of the ID3 algorithm for vertically partitioned data distributed over two or more parties. Along with a proof of security, we discuss what would be necessary to make the protocols completely secure. We also provide experimental results, giving a first demonstration of the practical complexity of secure multiparty computation-based data mining.