Federated Rule Ensemble Method in Medical Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a federated RuleFit framework that enables interpretable, accurate, and privacy-preserving machine learning across distributed medical datasets, addressing data heterogeneity and privacy concerns.

Contribution

It proposes a novel federated RuleFit method combining differentially private preprocessing, shared rule generation, and sparse coefficient estimation for interpretable models.

Findings

Achieved performance comparable to centralized RuleFit in simulations.

Outperformed existing federated approaches in predictive accuracy.

Provided interpretable insights in real-world medical data analysis.

Abstract

Machine learning has become integral to medical research and is increasingly applied in clinical settings to support diagnosis and decision-making; however, its effectiveness depends on access to large, diverse datasets, which are limited within single institutions. Although integrating data across institutions can address this limitation, privacy regulations and data ownership constraints hinder these efforts. Federated learning enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data; however, most methods rely on complex architectures that lack interpretability, limiting clinical applicability. Therefore, we proposed a federated RuleFit framework to construct a unified and interpretable global model for distributed environments. It integrates three components: preprocessing based on differentially private histograms to estimate shared cutoff values, enabling consistent rule definitions and reducing heterogeneity across clients; local rule generation using gradient boosting decision trees with shared cutoffs; and coefficient estimation via $\ell_1$-regularized optimization using a Federated Dual Averaging algorithm for sparse and consistent variable selection. In simulation studies, the proposed method achieved a performance comparable to that of centralized RuleFit while outperforming existing federated approaches. Real-world analysis demonstrated its ability to provide interpretable insights with competitive predictive accuracy. Therefore, the proposed framework offers a practical and effective solution for interpretable and reliable modeling in federated learning environments.