Federated Learning from Molecules to Processes: A Perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Rittig, Jan G., Kortmann, Clemens
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Rittig, Jan G.
Kortmann, Clemens
author_facet Rittig, Jan G.
Kortmann, Clemens
contents We present a perspective on federated learning in chemical engineering that envisions collaborative efforts in machine learning (ML) developments within the chemical industry. Large amounts of chemical and process data are proprietary to chemical companies and are therefore locked in data silos, hindering the training of ML models on large data sets in chemical engineering. Recently, the concept of federated learning has gained increasing attention in ML research, enabling organizations to jointly train machine learning models without disclosure of their individual data. We discuss potential applications of federated learning in several fields of chemical engineering, from the molecular to the process scale. In addition, we apply federated learning in two exemplary case studies that simulate practical scenarios of multiple chemical companies holding proprietary data sets: (i) prediction of binary mixture activity coefficients with graph neural networks and (ii) system identification of a distillation column with autoencoders. Our results indicate that ML models jointly trained with federated learning yield significantly higher accuracy than models trained by each chemical company individually and can perform similarly to models trained on combined datasets from all companies. Federated learning has therefore great potential to advance ML models in chemical engineering while respecting corporate data privacy, making it promising for future industrial applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_18525
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Federated Learning from Molecules to Processes: A Perspective
Rittig, Jan G.
Kortmann, Clemens
Machine Learning
Chemical Physics
We present a perspective on federated learning in chemical engineering that envisions collaborative efforts in machine learning (ML) developments within the chemical industry. Large amounts of chemical and process data are proprietary to chemical companies and are therefore locked in data silos, hindering the training of ML models on large data sets in chemical engineering. Recently, the concept of federated learning has gained increasing attention in ML research, enabling organizations to jointly train machine learning models without disclosure of their individual data. We discuss potential applications of federated learning in several fields of chemical engineering, from the molecular to the process scale. In addition, we apply federated learning in two exemplary case studies that simulate practical scenarios of multiple chemical companies holding proprietary data sets: (i) prediction of binary mixture activity coefficients with graph neural networks and (ii) system identification of a distillation column with autoencoders. Our results indicate that ML models jointly trained with federated learning yield significantly higher accuracy than models trained by each chemical company individually and can perform similarly to models trained on combined datasets from all companies. Federated learning has therefore great potential to advance ML models in chemical engineering while respecting corporate data privacy, making it promising for future industrial applications.
title Federated Learning from Molecules to Processes: A Perspective
topic Machine Learning
Chemical Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18525