Pliable Data Shuffling for On-device Distributed Learning

Dataset reshuffling across mobile devices allows for speeding up on-device distributed machine learning, which however requires significant communication bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a pliable data shuffling approach to significantly reduce the communication cost for on-device distributed learning via joint data placement and transmission design. This is achieved by establishing the novel interference alignment conditions and diversity constraints for data shuffling to improve the statistical learning performance. Unfortunately, the presented pliable data shuffling problem is a highly intractable mixed combinatorial optimization problem, for which a novel sparse and low-rank framework is developed, supported by the computationally efficient difference-of-convex (DC) algorithm. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed pliable data shuffling is able to significantly reduce the communication bandwidth while achieving desirable learning performance.