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Poster
Federated-EM with heterogeneity mitigation and variance reduction
Aymeric Dieuleveut · Gersende Fort · Eric Moulines · Geneviève Robin

Thu Dec 09 08:30 AM -- 10:00 AM (PST) @
in Poster Session 6 »

The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is the default algorithm for inference in latent variable models. As in any other field of machine learning, applications of latent variable models to very large datasets make the use of advanced parallel and distributed architecture mandatory. This paper introduces FedEM, which is the first extension of the EM algorithm to the federated learning context. FedEM is a new communication efficient method, which handles partial participation of local devices, and is robust to heterogeneous distribution of the datasets. To alleviate the communication bottleneck, FedEM compresses appropriately defined complete data sufficient statistics. We also develop and analyze an extension of FedEM to further incorporate a variance reduction scheme. In all cases, we derive finite-time complexity bounds for smooth non-convex problems. Numerical results are presented to support our theoretical findings, as well as an application to federated missing values imputation for biodiversity monitoring.

Keywords: Machine Learning · Federated Learning

Author Information

Aymeric Dieuleveut (Ecole Polytechnique, IPParis)
Gersende Fort (CNRS)
Eric Moulines (Ecole Polytechnique)
Geneviève Robin (CNRS, Université d'Évry Val d'Essonne)

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