RETRACTED ARTICLE: Securing health care data through blockchain enabled collaborative machine learning

Abstract

Transferring of data in machine learning from one party to another party is one of the issues that has been in existence since the development of technology. Health care data collection using machine learning techniques can lead to privacy issues which cause disturbances among the parties and reduces the possibility to work with either of the parties. Since centralized way of information transfer between two parties can be limited and risky as they are connected using machine learning, this factor motivated us to use the decentralized way where there is no connection but model transfer between both parties will be in process through a federated way. The purpose of this research is to investigate a model transfer between a user and the client(s) in an organization using federated learning techniques and reward the client(s) for their efforts with tokens accordingly using blockchain technology. In this research, the user shares a model to organizations that are willing to volunteer their service to provide help to the user. The model is trained and transferred among the user and the clients in the organizations in a privacy preserving way. In this research, we found that the process of model transfer between user and the volunteered organizations works completely fine with the help of federated learning techniques and the client(s) is/are rewarded with tokens for their efforts. We used the COVID-19 dataset to test the federation process, which yielded individual results of 88% for contributor a, 85% for contributor b, and 74% for contributor c. When using the FedAvg algorithm, we were able to achieve a total accuracy of 82%.