Empowering Digital Agriculture: A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Data Sharing and Collaborative Research

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zafar, Osama, González, Rosemarie Santa, Namazi, Mina, Morales, Alfonso, Ayday, Erman
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zafar, Osama
González, Rosemarie Santa
Namazi, Mina
Morales, Alfonso
Ayday, Erman
author_facet Zafar, Osama
González, Rosemarie Santa
Namazi, Mina
Morales, Alfonso
Ayday, Erman
contents Data-driven agriculture, which integrates technology and data into agricultural practices, has the potential to improve crop yield, disease resilience, and long-term soil health. However, privacy concerns, such as adverse pricing, discrimination, and resource manipulation, deter farmers from sharing data, as it can be used against them. To address this barrier, we propose a privacy-preserving framework that enables secure data sharing and collaboration for research and development while mitigating privacy risks. The framework combines dimensionality reduction techniques (like Principal Component Analysis (PCA)) and differential privacy by introducing Laplacian noise to protect sensitive information. The proposed framework allows researchers to identify potential collaborators for a target farmer and train personalized machine learning models either on the data of identified collaborators via federated learning or directly on the aggregated privacy-protected data. It also allows farmers to identify potential collaborators based on similarities. We have validated this on real-life datasets, demonstrating robust privacy protection against adversarial attacks and utility performance comparable to a centralized system. We demonstrate how this framework can facilitate collaboration among farmers and help researchers pursue broader research objectives. The adoption of the framework can empower researchers and policymakers to leverage agricultural data responsibly, paving the way for transformative advances in data-driven agriculture. By addressing critical privacy challenges, this work supports secure data integration, fostering innovation and sustainability in agricultural systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_20872
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Empowering Digital Agriculture: A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Data Sharing and Collaborative Research
Zafar, Osama
González, Rosemarie Santa
Namazi, Mina
Morales, Alfonso
Ayday, Erman
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Data-driven agriculture, which integrates technology and data into agricultural practices, has the potential to improve crop yield, disease resilience, and long-term soil health. However, privacy concerns, such as adverse pricing, discrimination, and resource manipulation, deter farmers from sharing data, as it can be used against them. To address this barrier, we propose a privacy-preserving framework that enables secure data sharing and collaboration for research and development while mitigating privacy risks. The framework combines dimensionality reduction techniques (like Principal Component Analysis (PCA)) and differential privacy by introducing Laplacian noise to protect sensitive information. The proposed framework allows researchers to identify potential collaborators for a target farmer and train personalized machine learning models either on the data of identified collaborators via federated learning or directly on the aggregated privacy-protected data. It also allows farmers to identify potential collaborators based on similarities. We have validated this on real-life datasets, demonstrating robust privacy protection against adversarial attacks and utility performance comparable to a centralized system. We demonstrate how this framework can facilitate collaboration among farmers and help researchers pursue broader research objectives. The adoption of the framework can empower researchers and policymakers to leverage agricultural data responsibly, paving the way for transformative advances in data-driven agriculture. By addressing critical privacy challenges, this work supports secure data integration, fostering innovation and sustainability in agricultural systems.
title Empowering Digital Agriculture: A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Data Sharing and Collaborative Research
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20872