Privacy-Preserving Cohort Analytics for Personalized Health Platforms: A Differentially Private Framework with Stochastic Risk Modeling
About
Personalized health analytics increasingly rely on population benchmarks to provide contextual insights such as ''How do I compare to others like me?'' However, cohort-based aggregation of health data introduces nontrivial privacy risks, particularly in interactive and longitudinal digital platforms. Existing privacy frameworks such as $k$-anonymity and differential privacy provide essential but largely static guarantees that do not fully capture the cumulative, distributional, and tail-dominated nature of re-identification risk in deployed systems. In this work, we present a privacy-preserving cohort analytics framework that combines deterministic cohort constraints, differential privacy mechanisms, and synthetic baseline generation to enable personalized population comparisons while maintaining strong privacy protections. We further introduce a stochastic risk modeling approach that treats re-identification risk as a random variable evolving over time, enabling distributional evaluation through Monte Carlo simulation. Adapting quantitative risk measures from financial mathematics, we define Privacy Loss at Risk (P-VaR) to characterize worst-case privacy outcomes under realistic cohort dynamics and adversary assumptions. We validate our framework through system-level analysis and simulation experiments, demonstrating how privacy-utility tradeoffs can be operationalized for digital health platforms. Our results suggest that stochastic risk modeling complements formal privacy guarantees by providing interpretable, decision-relevant metrics for platform designers, regulators, and clinical informatics stakeholders.