DBFed: Debiasing Federated Learning Framework based on Domain-Independent

TL;DR

This paper introduces DBFed, a federated learning framework that reduces bias by explicitly encoding sensitive attributes, improving fairness and accuracy across multiple datasets.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel debiasing method for federated learning that explicitly encodes sensitive attributes to mitigate bias and improve fairness.

Findings

DBFed outperforms comparative methods in accuracy and fairness metrics.

Explicit encoding of sensitive attributes effectively reduces model bias.

Experiments on three real datasets validate the debiasing effectiveness of DBFed.

Abstract

As digital transformation continues, enterprises are generating, managing, and storing vast amounts of data, while artificial intelligence technology is rapidly advancing. However, it brings challenges in information security and data security. Data security refers to the protection of digital information from unauthorized access, damage, theft, etc. throughout its entire life cycle. With the promulgation and implementation of data security laws and the emphasis on data security and data privacy by organizations and users, Privacy-preserving technology represented by federated learning has a wide range of application scenarios. Federated learning is a distributed machine learning computing framework that allows multiple subjects to train joint models without sharing data to protect data privacy and solve the problem of data islands. However, the data among multiple subjects are independent of each other, and the data differences in quality may cause fairness issues in federated learning modeling, such as data bias among multiple subjects, resulting in biased and discriminatory models. Therefore, we propose DBFed, a debiasing federated learning framework based on domain-independent, which mitigates model bias by explicitly encoding sensitive attributes during client-side training. This paper conducts experiments on three real datasets and uses five evaluation metrics of accuracy and fairness to quantify the effect of the model. Most metrics of DBFed exceed those of the other three comparative methods, fully demonstrating the debiasing effect of DBFed.