Federated Computation of ROC and PR Curves

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Xuefeng, Cormode, Graham
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xu, Xuefeng
Cormode, Graham
author_facet Xu, Xuefeng
Cormode, Graham
contents Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) and Precision-Recall (PR) curves are fundamental tools for evaluating machine learning classifiers, offering detailed insights into the trade-offs between true positive rate vs. false positive rate (ROC) or precision vs. recall (PR). However, in Federated Learning (FL) scenarios, where data is distributed across multiple clients, computing these curves is challenging due to privacy and communication constraints. Specifically, the server cannot access raw prediction scores and class labels, which are used to compute the ROC and PR curves in a centralized setting. In this paper, we propose a novel method for approximating ROC and PR curves in a federated setting by estimating quantiles of the prediction score distribution under distributed differential privacy. We provide theoretical bounds on the Area Error (AE) between the true and estimated curves, demonstrating the trade-offs between approximation accuracy, privacy, and communication cost. Empirical results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves high approximation accuracy with minimal communication and strong privacy guarantees, making it practical for privacy-preserving model evaluation in federated systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_04979
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Federated Computation of ROC and PR Curves
Xu, Xuefeng
Cormode, Graham
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) and Precision-Recall (PR) curves are fundamental tools for evaluating machine learning classifiers, offering detailed insights into the trade-offs between true positive rate vs. false positive rate (ROC) or precision vs. recall (PR). However, in Federated Learning (FL) scenarios, where data is distributed across multiple clients, computing these curves is challenging due to privacy and communication constraints. Specifically, the server cannot access raw prediction scores and class labels, which are used to compute the ROC and PR curves in a centralized setting. In this paper, we propose a novel method for approximating ROC and PR curves in a federated setting by estimating quantiles of the prediction score distribution under distributed differential privacy. We provide theoretical bounds on the Area Error (AE) between the true and estimated curves, demonstrating the trade-offs between approximation accuracy, privacy, and communication cost. Empirical results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves high approximation accuracy with minimal communication and strong privacy guarantees, making it practical for privacy-preserving model evaluation in federated systems.
title Federated Computation of ROC and PR Curves
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04979