John Cartmell

John Cartmell, Mihaela Cardei, Ionut Cardei

We present a method that uses the Bloom filter transform to preprocess data for machine learning. Each sample is encoded into a compact, privacy-preserving bit array. This reduces memory use and protects the original data while keeping enough structure for accurate classification. We test the method on six datasets: SMS Spam Collection, ECG200, Adult 50K, CDC Diabetes, MNIST, and Fashion MNIST. Four classifiers are used: Extreme Gradient Boosting, Deep Neural Networks, Convolutional Neural Networks, and Logistic Regression. Results show that models trained on Bloom filter encodings achieve accuracy similar to models trained on raw data or other transforms. At the same time, the method provides memory savings while enhancing privacy. These results suggest that the Bloom filter transform is an efficient preprocessing approach for diverse machine learning tasks.

John Cartmell, Alexander Williams

The increasing deployment of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices has accelerated the use of distributed learning frameworks, where data remains local while model updates are shared across decentralized systems. Although this reduces centralized data collection, it introduces privacy risks through the exchange of gradients, model parameters, and intermediate representations. A variety of privacy-preserving techniques have been proposed to address these risks, including differential privacy, cryptographic methods, and lightweight system-level approaches. However, existing surveys often evaluate these methods in isolation and lack a unified framework for comparing their effectiveness under realistic attack models and IoT resource constraints. This paper presents a structured analysis of privacy-preserving techniques for distributed learning in IoT environments. A unified threat model is introduced that captures model inversion, membership inference, gradient leakage, and communication-based attacks. Building on this model, an evaluation framework is developed to compare methods in terms of both privacy robustness and system-level efficiency, including computational, memory, and communication overhead. Using this framework, representative approaches including differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation, distributed selective stochastic gradient descent, and Bloom Filter-based methods are analyzed. The results highlight a fundamental trade-off between privacy strength and system efficiency. In particular, Bloom Filter-based encodings are shown to provide lightweight privacy through collision-induced ambiguity while maintaining low computational and communication overhead. The paper provides a unified perspective on privacy-preserving design choices for distributed learning in IoT systems.