Federated Rule Ensemble Method in Medical Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wan, Ke, Tanioka, Kensuke, Shimokawa, Toshio
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Wan, Ke
Tanioka, Kensuke
Shimokawa, Toshio
author_facet Wan, Ke
Tanioka, Kensuke
Shimokawa, Toshio
contents Machine learning has become integral to medical research and is increasingly applied in clinical settings to support diagnosis and decision-making; however, its effectiveness depends on access to large, diverse datasets, which are limited within single institutions. Although integrating data across institutions can address this limitation, privacy regulations and data ownership constraints hinder these efforts. Federated learning enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data; however, most methods rely on complex architectures that lack interpretability, limiting clinical applicability. Therefore, we proposed a federated RuleFit framework to construct a unified and interpretable global model for distributed environments. It integrates three components: preprocessing based on differentially private histograms to estimate shared cutoff values, enabling consistent rule definitions and reducing heterogeneity across clients; local rule generation using gradient boosting decision trees with shared cutoffs; and coefficient estimation via $\ell_1$-regularized optimization using a Federated Dual Averaging algorithm for sparse and consistent variable selection. In simulation studies, the proposed method achieved a performance comparable to that of centralized RuleFit while outperforming existing federated approaches. Real-world analysis demonstrated its ability to provide interpretable insights with competitive predictive accuracy. Therefore, the proposed framework offers a practical and effective solution for interpretable and reliable modeling in federated learning environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_17956
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Federated Rule Ensemble Method in Medical Data
Wan, Ke
Tanioka, Kensuke
Shimokawa, Toshio
Machine Learning
Methodology
Machine learning has become integral to medical research and is increasingly applied in clinical settings to support diagnosis and decision-making; however, its effectiveness depends on access to large, diverse datasets, which are limited within single institutions. Although integrating data across institutions can address this limitation, privacy regulations and data ownership constraints hinder these efforts. Federated learning enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data; however, most methods rely on complex architectures that lack interpretability, limiting clinical applicability. Therefore, we proposed a federated RuleFit framework to construct a unified and interpretable global model for distributed environments. It integrates three components: preprocessing based on differentially private histograms to estimate shared cutoff values, enabling consistent rule definitions and reducing heterogeneity across clients; local rule generation using gradient boosting decision trees with shared cutoffs; and coefficient estimation via $\ell_1$-regularized optimization using a Federated Dual Averaging algorithm for sparse and consistent variable selection. In simulation studies, the proposed method achieved a performance comparable to that of centralized RuleFit while outperforming existing federated approaches. Real-world analysis demonstrated its ability to provide interpretable insights with competitive predictive accuracy. Therefore, the proposed framework offers a practical and effective solution for interpretable and reliable modeling in federated learning environments.
title Federated Rule Ensemble Method in Medical Data
topic Machine Learning
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17956