Private Federated Multiclass Post-hoc Calibration

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Maddock, Samuel, Cormode, Graham, Maple, Carsten
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Maddock, Samuel
Cormode, Graham
Maple, Carsten
author_facet Maddock, Samuel
Cormode, Graham
Maple, Carsten
contents Calibrating machine learning models so that predicted probabilities better reflect the true outcome frequencies is crucial for reliable decision-making across many applications. In Federated Learning (FL), the goal is to train a global model on data which is distributed across multiple clients and cannot be centralized due to privacy concerns. FL is applied in key areas such as healthcare and finance where calibration is strongly required, yet federated private calibration has been largely overlooked. This work introduces the integration of post-hoc model calibration techniques within FL. Specifically, we transfer traditional centralized calibration methods such as histogram binning and temperature scaling into federated environments and define new methods to operate them under strong client heterogeneity. We study (1) a federated setting and (2) a user-level Differential Privacy (DP) setting and demonstrate how both federation and DP impacts calibration accuracy. We propose strategies to mitigate degradation commonly observed under heterogeneity and our findings highlight that our federated temperature scaling works best for DP-FL whereas our weighted binning approach is best when DP is not required.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_01987
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Private Federated Multiclass Post-hoc Calibration
Maddock, Samuel
Cormode, Graham
Maple, Carsten
Machine Learning
Calibrating machine learning models so that predicted probabilities better reflect the true outcome frequencies is crucial for reliable decision-making across many applications. In Federated Learning (FL), the goal is to train a global model on data which is distributed across multiple clients and cannot be centralized due to privacy concerns. FL is applied in key areas such as healthcare and finance where calibration is strongly required, yet federated private calibration has been largely overlooked. This work introduces the integration of post-hoc model calibration techniques within FL. Specifically, we transfer traditional centralized calibration methods such as histogram binning and temperature scaling into federated environments and define new methods to operate them under strong client heterogeneity. We study (1) a federated setting and (2) a user-level Differential Privacy (DP) setting and demonstrate how both federation and DP impacts calibration accuracy. We propose strategies to mitigate degradation commonly observed under heterogeneity and our findings highlight that our federated temperature scaling works best for DP-FL whereas our weighted binning approach is best when DP is not required.
title Private Federated Multiclass Post-hoc Calibration
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01987