Ye Yuan

Ye Yuan, Ling Shi, Jun Liu et al.

Fueled by applications in sensor networks, these years have witnessed a surge of interest in distributed estimation and filtering. A new approach is hereby proposed for the Distributed Kalman Filter (DKF) by integrating a local covariance computation scheme. Compared to existing well-established DKF methods, the virtue of the present approach lies in accelerating the convergence of the state estimates to those of the Centralized Kalman Filter (CKF). Meanwhile, an algorithm is proposed that allows each node to compute the averaged measurement noise covariance matrix within a minimal discrete-time running steps in a distributed way. Both theoretical analysis and extensive numerical simulations are conducted to show the feasibility and superiority of the proposed method.

Ye Yuan, Jun Liu, Dou Jin et al.

Traditional machine learning relies on a centralized data pipeline, i.e., data are provided to a central server for model training. In many applications, however, data are inherently fragmented. Such a decentralized nature of these databases presents the biggest challenge for collaboration: sending all decentralized datasets to a central server raises serious privacy concerns. Although there has been a joint effort in tackling such a critical issue by proposing privacy-preserving machine learning frameworks, such as federated learning, most state-of-the-art frameworks are built still in a centralized way, in which a central client is needed for collecting and distributing model information (instead of data itself) from every other client, leading to high communication pressure and high vulnerability when there exists a failure at or attack on the central client. Here we propose a principled decentralized federated learning algorithm (DeceFL), which does not require a central client and relies only on local information transmission between clients and their neighbors, representing a fully decentralized learning framework. It has been further proven that every client reaches the global minimum with zero performance gap and achieves the same convergence rate $O(1/T)$ (where $T$ is the number of iterations in gradient descent) as centralized federated learning when the loss function is smooth and strongly convex. Finally, the proposed algorithm has been applied to a number of applications to illustrate its effectiveness for both convex and nonconvex loss functions, demonstrating its applicability to a wide range of real-world medical and industrial applications.

Changming Zhao, Dongrui Wu, Jian Huang et al.

Bootstrap aggregating (Bagging) and boosting are two popular ensemble learning approaches, which combine multiple base learners to generate a composite model for more accurate and more reliable performance. They have been widely used in biology, engineering, healthcare, etc. This paper proposes BoostForest, which is an ensemble learning approach using BoostTree as base learners and can be used for both classification and regression. BoostTree constructs a tree model by gradient boosting. It increases the randomness (diversity) by drawing the cut-points randomly at node splitting. BoostForest further increases the randomness by bootstrapping the training data in constructing different BoostTrees. BoostForest generally outperformed four classical ensemble learning approaches (Random Forest, Extra-Trees, XGBoost and LightGBM) on 35 classification and regression datasets. Remarkably, BoostForest tunes its parameters by simply sampling them randomly from a parameter pool, which can be easily specified, and its ensemble learning framework can also be used to combine many other base learners.