Private predictions on hidden Markov models

Abstract

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are widely used in practice to make predictions. They are becoming increasingly popular models as part of prediction systems in finance, marketing, bio-informatics, speech recognition, signal processing, and so on. However, traditional HMMs do not allow people and model owners to generate predictions without disclosing their private information to each other. To address the increasing needs for privacy, this work identifies and studies the private prediction problem; it is demonstrated with the following scenario: Bob has a private HMM, while Alice has a private input; and she wants to use Bob's model to make a prediction based on her input. However, Alice does not want to disclose her private input to Bob, while Bob wants to prevent Alice from deriving information about his model. How can Alice and Bob perform HMMs-based predictions without violating their privacy? We propose privacy-preserving protocols to produce predictions on HMMs without greatly exposing Bob's and Alice's privacy. We then analyze our schemes in terms of accuracy, privacy, and performance. Since they are conflicting goals, due to privacy concerns, it is expected that accuracy or performance might degrade. However, our schemes make it possible for Bob and Alice to produce the same predictions efficiently while preserving their privacy.