A Federated Learning Framework Based on Spatio-Temporal Agnostic Subsampling (STAS) for Forest Fire Prediction

Prevention of forest fires increasingly impacted by climate change is essential to maintain ecological balance, preserve natural resources, prevent economic loss, and protect human and animal life. Data for forest fires is available from multiple sources and is huge. Federated learning can be implemented to distribute the computing across multiple edge devices by saving transmission costs, protecting data privacy, and maintaining security with no single point of failure as local models exist across multiple resources in different geographic regions. The proposed framework extends the Spatio-Temporal Agnostic Subsampling (STAS) technique by distributing the data into multiple computation nodes to leverage federated learning. It was found that the models trained using federated learning on weather data gained on average 0.3 in F1 for classifying the occurrence of fire. This study also demonstrates how to optimally choose the sources of data for either predicting the occurrence of fire or the severity of fire.