Federated personalized random forest for human activity recognition

Math Biosci Eng. 2022 Jan;19(1):953-971. doi: 10.3934/mbe.2022044. Epub 2021 Nov 22.

Abstract

User data usually exists in the organization or own local equipment in the form of data island. It is difficult to collect these data to train better machine learning models because of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other laws. The emergence of federated learning enables users to jointly train machine learning models without exposing the original data. Due to the fast training speed and high accuracy of random forest, it has been applied to federated learning among several data institutions. However, for human activity recognition task scenarios, the unified model cannot provide users with personalized services. In this paper, we propose a privacy-protected federated personalized random forest framework, which considers to solve the personalized application of federated random forest in the activity recognition task. According to the characteristics of the activity recognition data, the locality sensitive hashing is used to calculate the similarity of users. Users only train with similar users instead of all users and the model is incrementally selected using the characteristics of ensemble learning, so as to train the model in a personalized way. At the same time, user privacy is protected through differential privacy during the training stage. We conduct experiments on commonly used human activity recognition datasets to analyze the effectiveness of our model.

Keywords: differential privacy; federated learning; personalization; random forest.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Human Activities
  • Humans
  • Machine Learning*
  • Privacy*