Unified fair federated learning for digital healthcare.

Journal: Patterns (New York, N.Y.)
Published Date:

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach for healthcare institutions to train high-quality medical models collaboratively while protecting sensitive data privacy. However, FL models encounter fairness issues at diverse levels, leading to performance disparities across different subpopulations. To address this, we propose Federated Learning with Unified Fairness Objective (FedUFO), a unified framework consolidating diverse fairness levels within FL. By leveraging distributionally robust optimization and a unified uncertainty set, it ensures consistent performance across all subpopulations and enhances the overall efficacy of FL in healthcare and other domains while maintaining accuracy levels comparable with those of existing methods. Our model was validated by applying it to four digital healthcare tasks using real-world datasets in federated settings. Our collaborative machine learning paradigm not only promotes artificial intelligence in digital healthcare but also fosters social equity by embodying fairness.

Authors

  • Fengda Zhang
    Zhejiang University, 38 Zheda Road, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China.
  • Zitao Shuai
    Zhejiang University, 38 Zheda Road, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China.
  • Kun Kuang
    Zhejiang University, 38 Zheda Road, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China.
  • Fei Wu
    Zhejiang University, 38 Zheda Road, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China.
  • Yueting Zhuang
    Zhejiang University, 38 Zheda Road, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China.
  • Jun Xiao
    Zhejiang University, 38 Zheda Road, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China.

Keywords

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