English

Federated Automated Feature Engineering

Machine Learning 2025-04-23 v3 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

Abstract

Automated feature engineering (AutoFE) is used to automatically create new features from original features to improve predictive performance without needing significant human intervention and domain expertise. Many algorithms exist for AutoFE, but very few approaches exist for the federated learning (FL) setting where data is gathered across many clients and is not shared between clients or a central server. We introduce AutoFE algorithms for the horizontal, vertical, and hybrid FL settings, which differ in how the data is gathered across clients. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to develop AutoFE algorithms for the horizontal and hybrid FL cases, and we show that the downstream test scores of our federated AutoFE algorithms is close in performance to the case where data is held centrally and AutoFE is performed centrally.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.04404,
  title  = {Federated Automated Feature Engineering},
  author = {Tom Overman and Diego Klabjan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.04404},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Preliminary Work

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:24:35.971Z