The Cost of Training Machine Learning Models over Distributed Data Sources

TL;DR

This paper compares server-based, gossip, and blockchain federated learning methods, analyzing their performance, energy use, and security, highlighting trade-offs and open research issues in decentralized machine learning.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of three federated learning techniques using performance metrics and extensive simulations, offering insights into their advantages and limitations.

Findings

Gossip and standard federated learning achieve similar accuracy levels.

Energy consumption varies based on model, library, and hardware.

Blockchain federated learning offers higher security with increased energy use.

Abstract

Federated learning is one of the most appealing alternatives to the standard centralized learning paradigm, allowing a heterogeneous set of devices to train a machine learning model without sharing their raw data. However, it requires a central server to coordinate the learning process, thus introducing potential scalability and security issues. In the literature, server-less federated learning approaches like gossip federated learning and blockchain-enabled federated learning have been proposed to mitigate these issues. In this work, we propose a complete overview of these three techniques proposing a comparison according to an integral set of performance indicators, including model accuracy, time complexity, communication overhead, convergence time, and energy consumption. An extensive simulation campaign permits to draw a quantitative analysis considering both feedforward and convolutional neural network models. Results show that gossip federated learning and standard federated solution are able to reach a similar level of accuracy, and their energy consumption is influenced by the machine learning model adopted, the software library, and the hardware used. Differently, blockchain-enabled federated learning represents a viable solution for implementing decentralized learning with a higher level of security, at the cost of an extra energy usage and data sharing. Finally, we identify open issues on the two decentralized federated learning implementations and provide insights on potential extensions and possible research directions in this new research field.