“Dead or Alive, we can deny it”. A Differentially Private Approach to Survival Analysis

Survival Analyses (SAs), a key statistical tool used to predict event occurrence over time, often involve sensitive information, necessitating robust privacy safeguards. This work demonstrates how the Revised Randomized Response (RRR) can be adapted to ensure Differential Privacy (DP) while performing SAs. This methodology seeks to safeguard the privacy of individuals' data without significantly changing the utility, represented by the statistical properties of the survival rates computed. Our findings show that integrating DP through RRR into SAs is both practical and effective, providing a significant step forward in the privacy-preserving analysis of sensitive time-to-event data. This study contributes to the field by offering a new comparison method to the current state-of-the-art used for SAs in medical research.