ECONoMy: Ensemble Collaborative Learning Using Masking

Abstract

In a society where digital data has become ubiquitous and has been projected to continue in this trajectory for the foreseeable future, machine learning has become a dependable tool to aid in analyzing these big datasets. However, where the data or machine learning algorithms are considered to be privacy-sensitive, one is then faced with the challenge of preserving the utility of machine learning in a privacy-preserving setting. In this paper, we focus on a use case where decentralized parties have privately owned machine learning algorithms, and would want to jointly generate a public model while not violating the privacy of their individual models, and data. We present ECONoMy: a privacy-preserving protocol that supports collaborative learning using an ensemble technique. Set in an honest-but-curious security model, ECONoMy is lightweight and provides efficiency and privacy in settings with large participant such as with IoT devices.