Benchmarking federated strategies in Peer-to-Peer Federated learning for biomedical data

Abstract: The increasing requirements for data protection and privacy has attracted a huge research interest on distributed artificial intelligence and specifically on federated learning, an emerging machine learning approach that allows the construction of a model between several participants who hold their own private data. In the initial proposal of federated learning the architecture was centralised and the aggregation was done with federated averaging, meaning that a central server will orchestrate the federation using the most straightforward averaging strategy. This research is focused on testing different federated strategies in a peer-to-peer environment. The authors propose various aggregation strategies for federated learning, including weighted averaging aggregation, using different factors and strategies based on participant contribution. The strategies are tested with varying data sizes to identify the most robust ones. This research tests the strategies with several biomedical datasets and the results of the experiments show that the accuracy-based weighted average outperforms the classical federated averaging method.