Contribution prediction in federated learning via client behavior evaluation

Federated learning (FL), a decentralized machine learning framework that allows edge devices (i.e., clients) to train a global model while preserving data/client privacy, has become increasingly popular recently. In FL, a shared global model is built by aggregating the updated parameters in a distributed manner. To incentivize data owners to participate in FL, it is essential for service providers to fairly evaluate the contribution of each data owner to the shared model during the learning process. To the best of our knowledge, most existing solutions are resource-demanding and usually run as an additional evaluation procedure. The latter produces an expensive computational cost for large data owners. In this paper, we present simple and effective FL solutions that show how the clients’ behavior can be evaluated during the training process with respect to reliability, and this is demonstrated for two existing FL models, Cluster Analysis-based Federated Learning (CA-FL) and Group-Personalized FL (GP-FL), respectively. In the former model, CA-FL, the frequency of each client to be selected as a cluster representative and in that way to be involved in the building of the shared model is assessed. This can eventually be considered as a measure of the respective client data reliability. In the latter model, GP-FL, we calculate how many times each client changes a cluster it belongs to during FL training, which can be interpreted as a measure of the client's unstable behavior, i.e., it can be considered as not very reliable. We validate our FL approaches on three LEAF datasets and benchmark their performance to two baseline contribution evaluation approaches. The experimental results demonstrate that by applying the two FL models we are able to get robust evaluations of clients’ behavior during the training process. These evaluations can be used for further studying, comparing, understanding, and eventually predicting clients’ contributions to the shared global model.