Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/85990
Title: Deterministic identification of specific individuals from GWAS results
Authors: Cai, Ruichu
Hao, Zhifeng
Winslett, Marianne
Xiao, Xiaokui
Yang, Yin
Zhang, Zhenjie
Zhou, Shuigeng
Keywords: Genotype
Algorithm
Issue Date: 2015
Source: Cai, R., Hao, Z., Winslett, M., Xiao, X., Yang, Y., Zhang, Z., et al. (2015). Deterministic identification of specific individuals from GWAS results. Bioinformatics, 31(11), 1701-1707.
Series/Report no.: Bioinformatics
Abstract: Motivation: Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) are commonly applied on human genomic data to understand the causal gene combinations statistically connected to certain diseases. Patients involved in these GWASs could be re-identified when the studies release statistical information on a large number of single-nucleotide polymorphisms. Subsequent work, however, found that such privacy attacks are theoretically possible but unsuccessful and unconvincing in real settings. Results: We derive the first practical privacy attack that can successfully identify specific individuals from limited published associations from the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (WTCCC) dataset. For GWAS results computed over 25 randomly selected loci, our algorithm always pinpoints at least one patient from the WTCCC dataset. Moreover, the number of re-identified patients grows rapidly with the number of published genotypes. Finally, we discuss prevention methods to disable the attack, thus providing a solution for enhancing patient privacy. Availability and implementation: Proofs of the theorems and additional experimental results are available in the support online documents. The attack algorithm codes are publicly available at https://sites.google.com/site/zhangzhenjie/GWAS_attack.zip. The genomic dataset used in the experiments is available at http://www.wtccc.org.uk/ on request.
URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/85990
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/43909
ISSN: 1367-4803
DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btv018
Schools: School of Computer Science and Engineering 
Rights: © 2015 The Author.
Fulltext Permission: none
Fulltext Availability: No Fulltext
Appears in Collections:SCSE Journal Articles

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