FedCFA: Alleviating Simpson's Paradox in Model Aggregation with Counterfactual Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jiang, Zhonghua, Xu, Jimin, Zhang, Shengyu, Shen, Tao, Li, Jiwei, Kuang, Kun, Cai, Haibin, Wu, Fei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Jiang, Zhonghua
Xu, Jimin
Zhang, Shengyu
Shen, Tao
Li, Jiwei
Kuang, Kun
Cai, Haibin
Wu, Fei
author_facet Jiang, Zhonghua
Xu, Jimin
Zhang, Shengyu
Shen, Tao
Li, Jiwei
Kuang, Kun
Cai, Haibin
Wu, Fei
contents Federated learning (FL) is a promising technology for data privacy and distributed optimization, but it suffers from data imbalance and heterogeneity among clients. Existing FL methods try to solve the problems by aligning client with server model or by correcting client model with control variables. These methods excel on IID and general Non-IID data but perform mediocrely in Simpson's Paradox scenarios. Simpson's Paradox refers to the phenomenon that the trend observed on the global dataset disappears or reverses on a subset, which may lead to the fact that global model obtained through aggregation in FL does not accurately reflect the distribution of global data. Thus, we propose FedCFA, a novel FL framework employing counterfactual learning to generate counterfactual samples by replacing local data critical factors with global average data, aligning local data distributions with the global and mitigating Simpson's Paradox effects. In addition, to improve the quality of counterfactual samples, we introduce factor decorrelation (FDC) loss to reduce the correlation among features and thus improve the independence of extracted factors. We conduct extensive experiments on six datasets and verify that our method outperforms other FL methods in terms of efficiency and global model accuracy under limited communication rounds.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_18904
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FedCFA: Alleviating Simpson's Paradox in Model Aggregation with Counterfactual Federated Learning
Jiang, Zhonghua
Xu, Jimin
Zhang, Shengyu
Shen, Tao
Li, Jiwei
Kuang, Kun
Cai, Haibin
Wu, Fei
Machine Learning
Federated learning (FL) is a promising technology for data privacy and distributed optimization, but it suffers from data imbalance and heterogeneity among clients. Existing FL methods try to solve the problems by aligning client with server model or by correcting client model with control variables. These methods excel on IID and general Non-IID data but perform mediocrely in Simpson's Paradox scenarios. Simpson's Paradox refers to the phenomenon that the trend observed on the global dataset disappears or reverses on a subset, which may lead to the fact that global model obtained through aggregation in FL does not accurately reflect the distribution of global data. Thus, we propose FedCFA, a novel FL framework employing counterfactual learning to generate counterfactual samples by replacing local data critical factors with global average data, aligning local data distributions with the global and mitigating Simpson's Paradox effects. In addition, to improve the quality of counterfactual samples, we introduce factor decorrelation (FDC) loss to reduce the correlation among features and thus improve the independence of extracted factors. We conduct extensive experiments on six datasets and verify that our method outperforms other FL methods in terms of efficiency and global model accuracy under limited communication rounds.
title FedCFA: Alleviating Simpson's Paradox in Model Aggregation with Counterfactual Federated Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18904