Dear all, The next seminar in our series of statistics talks for people interested in quantitative methods in biology and medicine will take place on Thursday 11 January 2018 at 14:00, in the conference room C04 situated on the floor -1 of the Biopôle 1 building (also known as SC-B building, see the enclosed map) located on the route de la Corniche 10, 1066 Epalinges (M2 stop: Les Croisettes). The speakers will be Prof. Marcel Zwahlen and Dr. Adrian Spoerri from the Institute for Social and Preventive Medicine of the University of Berne. Two articles about this presentation are enclosed to this email. Title: Record linkage: deterministic versus probabilistic versus data protection issues Abstract: Record linkage of existing individual health care data is an efficient way to answer important epidemiological research questions. Reuse of individual health-related data faces several problems: Either a unique personal identifier, like social security number, is not available or non-unique person identifiable information, like names, are privacy protected and cannot be accessed. A solution to protect privacy in probabilistic record linkages is to encrypt these sensitive information. Unfortunately, encrypted hash codes of two names differ completely if the plain names differ only by a single character. Therefore, standard encryption methods cannot be applied. To overcome these challenges, and comply certain encryption methods exist which allow to preserve data protection (Privacy Preserving Probabilistic Record Linkage (P3RL) methods). We will present the principles of probabilistic record linkage and of the P3RL methods. Happy new year and hope to see you there! Valentin (for the organizers: Zoltán Kutalik, Valentin Rousson, Frédéric Schütz)
