Federated Learning: Privacy By Design For Machine Learning

With cyberattacks and data breaches at all-time highs, consumers are increasingly skeptical about sharing their data with enterprises, creating a dilemma for artificial intelligence (AI) that needs massive data to thrive.The nascent technology of federated learning offers an ideal growingalternative for healthcare, life sciences, banking, finance, manufacturing, advertising, and other industries to unleash the full potential of AI without compromising the privacy of individuals. To learn how you can have all the data you need while protecting consumers, read on.  

The infinite number of massive data breaches that have stripped individuals of their privacy has made the public more aware of the need to protect their data. In the absence of strong governance and guidelines, people are more skeptical than ever about sharing their personal data with enterprises.

This new data-conscious paradigm poses a problem for artificial intelligence (AI) that thrives on huge amounts of data. Unless we can figure out a way to train machines on significantly smaller data sets, protecting the privacy and data of users will remain key obstacles to intelligent automation.

Federated learning (FL) is emerging as a solution to overcome this problem. Broadly speaking, Federated learning is a method of training machine learning models in a way that the user data does not leave its location, keeping it safe and private. This differs from the traditional centralized machine learning methods that require the data to be aggregated in a centralized location.

Federated learning is a mechanism of machine learning, wherein the process of learning takes place in a decentralized manner across a network of nodes/edge devices, and the results are aggregated in a central server to create a unified model. It essentially comprises decoupling the activity of model training with centralized data storage.

By training the same model across an array of devices, each with its own set of data, we get multiple versions of the model, which, when combined, create a more powerful and accurate global version for deployment and use.

In addition to training algorithms in a private and secure manner, Federated learning provides an array of other benefits such as:

Based on an Everest Group framework, we have found Federated learning is most suitable and being adopted at higher rates in industrials where data is an extremely critical asset that is present across different locations in a distributed fashion and privacy is paramount.

Federated learning is especially beneficial for industries that have strict data residency requirements. This makes the healthcare and life-sciences industries perfect candidates for its adoption.