  Tensor factorization has been demonstrated as an efficient approach for
computational phenotyping, where massive electronic health records (EHRs) are
converted to concise and meaningful clinical concepts. While distributing the
tensor factorization tasks to local sites can avoid direct data sharing, it
still requires the exchange of intermediary results which could reveal
sensitive patient information. Therefore, the challenge is how to jointly
decompose the tensor under rigorous and principled privacy constraints, while
still support the model's interpretability. We propose DPFact, a
privacy-preserving collaborative tensor factorization method for computational
phenotyping using EHR. It embeds advanced privacy-preserving mechanisms with
collaborative learning. Hospitals can keep their EHR database private but also
collaboratively learn meaningful clinical concepts by sharing differentially
private intermediary results. Moreover, DPFact solves the heterogeneous patient
population using a structured sparsity term. In our framework, each hospital
decomposes its local tensors, and sends the updated intermediary results with
output perturbation every several iterations to a semi-trusted server which
generates the phenotypes. The evaluation on both real-world and synthetic
datasets demonstrated that under strict privacy constraints, our method is more
accurate and communication-efficient than state-of-the-art baseline methods.
