Serverless Federated AUPRC Optimization for Multi-Party Collaborative Imbalanced Data Mining

To address the big data challenges, serverless multi-party collaborative training has recently attracted attention in the data mining community, since they can cut down the communications cost by avoiding the server node bottleneck. However, traditional serverless multi-party collaborative training algorithms were mainly designed for balanced data mining tasks and are intended to optimize accuracy (e.g., cross-entropy). The data distribution in many real-world applications is skewed and classifiers, which are trained to improve accuracy, perform poorly when applied to imbalanced data tasks since models could be significantly biased toward the primary class. Therefore, the Area Under Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC) was introduced as an effective metric. Although multiple single-machine methods have been designed to train models for AUPRC maximization, the algorithm for multi-party collaborative training has never been studied. The change from the single-machine to the multi-party setting poses critical challenges. For example, existing single-machine-based AUPRC maximization algorithms maintain an inner state for local each data point, thus these methods are not applicable to large-scale multi-party collaborative training due to the dependence on each local data point.

To address the above challenge, in this paper, we reformulate the serverless multi-party collaborative AUPRC maximization problem as a conditional stochastic optimization problem in a serverless multi-party collaborative learning setting and propose a new ServerLess biAsed sTochastic gradiEnt (SLATE) algorithm to directly optimize the AUPRC. After that, we use the variance reduction technique and propose ServerLess biAsed sTochastic gradiEnt with Momentum-based variance reduction (SLATE-M) algorithm to improve the convergence rate, which matches the best theoretical convergence result reached by the single-machine online method. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to solve the multi-party collaborative AUPRC maximization problem. Finally, extensive experiments show the advantages of directly optimizing the AUPRC with distributed learning methods and also verify the efficiency of our new algorithms (i.e., SLATE and SLATE-M).