Implementing Vertical Federated Learning Using Autoencoders: Practical Application, Generalizability, and Utility Study
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Machine learning (ML) is now widely deployed in our everyday lives. Building robust ML models requires a massive amount of data for training. Traditional ML algorithms require training data centralization, which raises privacy and data governance issues. Federated learning (FL) is an approach to overcome this issue. We focused on applying FL on vertically partitioned data, in which an individual's record is scattered among different sites. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to perform FL on vertically partitioned data to achieve performance comparable to that of centralized models without exposing the raw data. METHODS: We used three different datasets (Adult income, Schwannoma, and eICU datasets) and vertically divided each dataset into different pieces. Following the vertical division of data, overcomplete autoencoder-based model training was performed for each site. Following training, each site's data were transformed into latent data, which were aggregated for training. A tabular neural network model with categorical embedding was used for training. A centrally based model was used as a baseline model, which was compared to that of FL in terms of accuracy and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC). RESULTS: The autoencoder-based network successfully transformed the original data into latent representations with no domain knowledge applied. These altered data were different from the original data in terms of the feature space and data distributions, indicating appropriate data security. The loss of performance was minimal when using an overcomplete autoencoder; accuracy loss was 1.2%, 8.89%, and 1.23%, and AUROC loss was 1.1%, 0%, and 1.12% in the Adult income, Schwannoma, and eICU dataset, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: We proposed an autoencoder-based ML model for vertically incomplete data. Since our model is based on unsupervised learning, no domain-specific knowledge is required in individual sites. Under the circumstances where direct data sharing is not available, our approach may be a practical solution enabling both data protection and building a robust model.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.052 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it