Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Huynh, Tan-Khiem, Egan, Malcolm, Neglia, Giovanni, Gorce, Jean-Marie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18807
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908607157633024
author Huynh, Tan-Khiem
Egan, Malcolm
Neglia, Giovanni
Gorce, Jean-Marie
author_facet Huynh, Tan-Khiem
Egan, Malcolm
Neglia, Giovanni
Gorce, Jean-Marie
contents Federated learning (FL) is now recognized as a key framework for communication-efficient collaborative learning. Most theoretical and empirical studies, however, rely on the assumption that clients have access to pre-collected data sets, with limited investigation into scenarios where clients continuously collect data. In many real-world applications, particularly when data is generated by physical or biological processes, client data streams are often modeled by non-stationary Markov processes. Unlike standard i.i.d. sampling, the performance of FL with Markovian data streams remains poorly understood due to the statistical dependencies between client samples over time. In this paper, we investigate whether FL can still support collaborative learning with Markovian data streams. Specifically, we analyze the performance of Minibatch SGD, Local SGD, and a variant of Local SGD with momentum. We answer affirmatively under standard assumptions and smooth non-convex client objectives: the sample complexity is proportional to the inverse of the number of clients with a communication complexity comparable to the i.i.d. scenario. However, the sample complexity for Markovian data streams remains higher than for i.i.d. sampling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_18807
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Streaming Federated Learning with Markovian Data
Huynh, Tan-Khiem
Egan, Malcolm
Neglia, Giovanni
Gorce, Jean-Marie
Machine Learning
Federated learning (FL) is now recognized as a key framework for communication-efficient collaborative learning. Most theoretical and empirical studies, however, rely on the assumption that clients have access to pre-collected data sets, with limited investigation into scenarios where clients continuously collect data. In many real-world applications, particularly when data is generated by physical or biological processes, client data streams are often modeled by non-stationary Markov processes. Unlike standard i.i.d. sampling, the performance of FL with Markovian data streams remains poorly understood due to the statistical dependencies between client samples over time. In this paper, we investigate whether FL can still support collaborative learning with Markovian data streams. Specifically, we analyze the performance of Minibatch SGD, Local SGD, and a variant of Local SGD with momentum. We answer affirmatively under standard assumptions and smooth non-convex client objectives: the sample complexity is proportional to the inverse of the number of clients with a communication complexity comparable to the i.i.d. scenario. However, the sample complexity for Markovian data streams remains higher than for i.i.d. sampling.
title Streaming Federated Learning with Markovian Data
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18807