A VAE Conversion Method for Private Data Linkage

Data linkage plays a crucial role in realizing big data's value but is often regarded as a threat to personal privacy. Regulations like GDPR requires users' consent on each specific use of data, which is not practical for data analyzers. In this study, we propose a way to address the problem by having a trustworthy third party collect data from two or more parties, then use the data to train one or more variational autoencoder (VAE) models to remove privacy and send them to the data providers. Using this model, the users express their consent to share data with a trustworthy party. The third party links data from various datasets together to build a variational autoencoder model that allows all parties to generate datasets with full attributes without revealing sensitive personal data. System architectures and machine learning accuracy of generated data sets are measured in this study.