Data-Free Diversity-Based Ensemble Selection For One-Shot Federated Learning in Machine Learning Model Market

Abstract: The emerging availability of trained machine learning models has put forward the novel concept of Machine Learning Model Market in which one can harness the collective intelligence of multiple well-trained models to improve the performance of the resultant model through one-shot federated learning and ensemble learning in a data-free manner. However, picking the models available in the market for ensemble learning is time-consuming, as using all the models is not always the best approach. It is thus crucial to have an effective ensemble selection strategy that can find a good subset of the base models for the ensemble. Conventional ensemble selection techniques are not applicable, as we do not have access to the local datasets of the parties in the federated learning setting. In this paper, we present a novel Data-Free Diversity-Based method called DeDES to address the ensemble selection problem for models generated by one-shot federated learning in practical applications such as model markets. Experiments showed that our method can achieve both better performance and higher efficiency over 5 datasets and 4 different model structures under the different data-partition strategies.