Distribution-Controlled Client Selection to Improve Federated Learning Strategies

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Düsing, Christoph, Cimiano, Philipp
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Düsing, Christoph
Cimiano, Philipp
author_facet Düsing, Christoph
Cimiano, Philipp
contents Federated learning (FL) is a distributed learning paradigm that allows multiple clients to jointly train a shared model while maintaining data privacy. Despite its great potential for domains with strict data privacy requirements, the presence of data imbalance among clients is a thread to the success of FL, as it causes the performance of the shared model to decrease. To address this, various studies have proposed enhancements to existing FL strategies, particularly through client selection methods that mitigate the detrimental effects of data imbalance. In this paper, we propose an extension to existing FL strategies, which selects active clients that best align the current label distribution with one of two target distributions, namely a balanced distribution or the federations combined label distribution. Subsequently, we empirically verify the improvements through our distribution-controlled client selection on three common FL strategies and two datasets. Our results show that while aligning the label distribution with a balanced distribution yields the greatest improvements facing local imbalance, alignment with the federation's combined label distribution is superior for global imbalance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_20877
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distribution-Controlled Client Selection to Improve Federated Learning Strategies
Düsing, Christoph
Cimiano, Philipp
Machine Learning
Federated learning (FL) is a distributed learning paradigm that allows multiple clients to jointly train a shared model while maintaining data privacy. Despite its great potential for domains with strict data privacy requirements, the presence of data imbalance among clients is a thread to the success of FL, as it causes the performance of the shared model to decrease. To address this, various studies have proposed enhancements to existing FL strategies, particularly through client selection methods that mitigate the detrimental effects of data imbalance. In this paper, we propose an extension to existing FL strategies, which selects active clients that best align the current label distribution with one of two target distributions, namely a balanced distribution or the federations combined label distribution. Subsequently, we empirically verify the improvements through our distribution-controlled client selection on three common FL strategies and two datasets. Our results show that while aligning the label distribution with a balanced distribution yields the greatest improvements facing local imbalance, alignment with the federation's combined label distribution is superior for global imbalance.
title Distribution-Controlled Client Selection to Improve Federated Learning Strategies
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20877