AAFL: Asynchronous-Adaptive Federated Learning in Edge-Based Wireless Communication Systems for Countering Communicable Infectious Diseasess

With the rapid growth of the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) cases, massive amounts of relevant data are being trained on machine learning models for countering communicable infectious diseases. Federated Learning (FL) is a paradigm of distributed machine learning to deal with the individual COVID-19 data, and enable the protection of data privacy. However, FL has low efficiency in Edge-Based wireless communication systems with system heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose an “Asynchronous-Adaptive FL” (AAFL) scheme. Specifically, we allow that medical devices with different performances have a heterogeneous number of local SGD iterations in each communication round, called asynchronous iteration strategy which is balanced under adaptive control. We theoretically analyze the convergence of the AAFL scheme under a given time budget and obtain a mathematical relationship between the heterogeneous number of local SGD iterations and the optimal model parameters. Based on the mathematical relationship, we design an algorithm for parameter server and work nodes to adaptively control the heterogeneous number of local SGD iterations. Subsequently, we build a prototype heterogeneous system and conduct experiments on various scenarios for analyzing the general properties of our algorithm, and then apply our algorithm to public COVID-19 databases. The experimental results and application performance demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our AAFL scheme.