Hybrid-FL: Cooperative Learning Mechanism Using Non-IID Data in Wireless Networks

A decentralized learning mechanism, Federated Learning (FL), has attracted much attention, which enables privacy-preserving training using the rich data and computational resources of mobile clients. However, data on mobile clients is typically not independent and identically distributed (IID) owing to diverse of mobile users' interest and usage, and FL on non-IID data could degrade the model performance. This work aims to extend FL to solve the performance degradation problem resulting from non-IID data of mobile clients. We assume that a limited number (e.g., less than 1%) of clients who allow their data to be uploaded to a server, and we propose a novel learning mechanism referred to as Hybrid-FL, where the server updates the model using data gathered from the clients and merge the model with models trained by clients. In Hybrid-FL, we design a heuristic algorithms that solves the data and client selection problem to construct "good" dataset on the server under bandwidth and time limitation. The algorithm increases the amount of data gathered from clients and makes the data approximately IID for improving model performance. Evaluations consisting of network simulations and machine learning (ML) experiments show that the proposed scheme achieves a significantly higher classification accuracy than previous schemes in the non-IID case.