VALORIS: A privacy-aware logistic regression method for vertically partitioned data within a novel privacy risk assessment framework

Life sciences research increasingly relies on variables held by different entities, such as clinical, laboratory, environmental, and genomic data. Due to legal, ethical, and social acceptability constraints, these data often cannot be shared across organizations holding them. As a result, they cannot be pooled, and analyses must be conducted within the framework of vertically partitioned data. Supporting such analyses requires methods that protect privacy. However, the mere fact that line-level data are not exchanged should not be mistaken for true privacy protection. We introduce VALORIS (Vertically partitioned Analytics under the LOgistic Regression model for Inference in Statistics), a novel method that enables statistical inference under a logistic regression model without disclosing any individual-level data—including the outcome variable. VALORIS is a practical, communication-efficient algorithm that requires no third-party coordinator. Most importantly, it includes a novel framework for evaluating privacy, allowing users to distinguish among different levels of privacy preservation.