Flexible Differential Privacy for Internet of Medical Things Based on Evolutionary Learning

With the development of Internet of medical things (IOMT), a lot of medical data are stored and released for both scientific research and practical applications. Accurate medical data is very valuable, but it also brings a huge risk of privacy leakage. Moreover, improving the privacy of data often leads to the reduction of data validity. Privacy and effectiveness are in conflict, and their balance is a typical multiobjective optimization problem (MOP). In this article, we try to use differential privacy to disturb medical data to protect personal privacy. We propose the environment switching algorithm (ESA) based on evolutionary learning to solve this MOP. ESA has excellent performance, which can ensure convergence speed and optimization performance at the same time. The result of optimization is a Pareto front (PF) of huge scale, which includes solutions with different characteristics. We put forward a method of double clustering to select the appropriate solution from PF. Based on the above, we conclude the whole method as flexible differential privacy algorithm based on evolutionary learning (FDPEL). FDPEL can realize flexible differential privacy for medical data, while ensuring data privacy and data validity. FDPEL is suitable for privacy protection of medical data of different scales, which makes it have a practical applications value.