Federated learning (FL) is a distributed learning approach where a set of end-user devices participate in the learning process by acting on their isolated local data sets. Here, we process local data sets of users where worst-case optimization theory is used to reformulate the FL problem where the impact of local data sets in training phase is considered as an uncertain function bounded in a closed uncertainty region. This representation allows us to compare the performance of FL with its centralized counterpart, and to replace the uncertain function with a concept of protection functions leading to more tractable formulation. The latter supports applying a regularization factor in each user cost function in FL to reach a better performance. We evaluated our model using the MNIST data set versus the protection function parameters, e.g., regularization factors.
@article{arxiv.1912.05571,
title = {Representation of Federated Learning via Worst-Case Robust Optimization Theory},
author = {Saeedeh Parsaeefard and Iman Tabrizian and Alberto Leon Garcia},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.05571},
year = {2019}
}