FENDA-FL: Personalized Federated Learning on Heterogeneous Clinical Datasets

Federated learning (FL) is increasingly being recognized as a key approach to overcoming the data silos that so frequently obstruct the training and deployment of machine-learning models in clinical settings. This work contributes to a growing body of FL research specifically focused on clinical applications along three important directions. First, we expand the FLamby benchmark (du Terrail et al., 2022a) to include evaluation of personalized FL methods and demonstrate substantive performance improvements over the original results. Next, we advocate for a comprehensive checkpointing and evaluation framework for FL to reflect practical settings and provide multiple comparison baselines. Finally, we study an important ablation of PerFCL (Zhang et al., 2022). This ablation is a natural extension of FENDA (Kim et al., 2016) to the FL setting. Experiments conducted on the FLamby benchmarks and GEMINI datasets (Verma et al., 2017) show that the approach is robust to heterogeneous clinical data and often outperforms existing global and personalized FL techniques, including PerFCL.