Secure distributed multiple imputation enables missing data inference for private data proprietors

Haris Smajlović

doi:10.1038/s41746-025-02271-0

Secure distributed multiple imputation enables missing data inference for private data proprietors

2026-01-10

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DOI：10.1038/s41746-025-02271-0

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Scattered between many healthcare providers across the US, Electronic Health Records (EHR) are extensively used for research purposes. Collaboration and sharing of EHRs between multiple institutions often provide access to more diverse datasets and a chance to conduct comprehensive studies. However, these collaboration efforts are usually hindered by privacy issues that render the pooling of such data at a centralized database impossible. Furthermore, EHRs are often incomplete and require statistical imputation prior to the study. To enable collaborative studies on top of incomplete, private EHRs, here we provide a provably secure solution built with secure multiparty computation (SMC) that provides practical runtimes and accuracy on par with the state-of-the-art, non-secure equivalents. Our solution enables the utilization of distributed datasets as a whole to impute the missing data and conduct collective studies between non-trusting private data proprietors. We demonstrate its effectiveness on various synthetic and real-world datasets, and show that our solution can significantly improve the classification of high-risk patient outcomes during ICU admission.

Keywords:

Secure multiparty computation

Electronic Health Records

Missing data imputation

Distributed data analysis

Privacy-preserving analytics

Secure distributed multiple imputation enables missing data inference for private data proprietors

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