A comprehensive experimental comparison between federated and centralized learning

PurposeFederated learning is an upcoming machine learning paradigm which allows data from multiple sources to be used for training of classifiers without the data leaving the source it originally resides. This can be highly valuable for use cases such as medical research, where gathering data at a central location can be quite complicated due to privacy and legal concerns of the data. In such cases, federated learning has the potential to vastly speed up the research cycle. Although federated and central learning have been compared from a theoretical perspective, an extensive experimental comparison of performances and learning behavior still lacks. MethodsWe have performed a comprehensive experimental comparison between federated and centralized learning. We evaluated various classifiers on various datasets exploring influences of different sample distributions as well as different class distributions across the clients. ResultsThe results show similar performances under a wide variety of settings between the federated and central learning strategies. Federated learning is able to deal with various imbalances in the data distributions. It is sensitive to batch effects between different datasets when they coincide with location, similar as with central learning, but this setting might go unobserved more easily. ConclusionFederated learning seems robust to various challenges such as skewed data distributions, high data dimensionality, multiclass problems and complex models. Taken together, the insights from our comparison gives much promise for applying federated learning as an alternative to sharing data.