Federated Multi-View Learning for Private Medical Data Integration and Analysis
This work addresses privacy and data heterogeneity challenges in medical AI, offering a novel framework for federated multi-view learning, though it appears incremental in combining existing federated and multi-view concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of integrating and analyzing private medical data from multiple sources and views while preserving privacy, by proposing a Federated Multi-View Learning framework that handles both vertical and horizontal data splits, and demonstrates improved performance over single-view and pairwise methods on real-world keyboard data from the BiAffect study.
Along with the rapid expansion of information technology and digitalization of health data, there is an increasing concern on maintaining data privacy while garnering the benefits in medical field. Two critical challenges are identified: Firstly, medical data is naturally distributed across multiple local sites, making it difficult to collectively train machine learning models without data leakage. Secondly, in medical applications, data are often collected from different sources and views, resulting in heterogeneity and complexity that requires reconciliation. This paper aims to provide a generic Federated Multi-View Learning (FedMV) framework for multi-view data leakage prevention, which is based on different types of local data availability and enables to accommodate two types of problems: Vertical Federated Multi-View Learning (V-FedMV) and Horizontal Federated Multi-View Learning (H-FedMV). We experimented with real-world keyboard data collected from BiAffect study. The results demonstrated that the proposed FedMV approach can make full use of multi-view data in a privacy-preserving way, and both V-FedMV and H-FedMV methods perform better than their single-view and pairwise counterparts. Besides, the proposed model can be easily adapted to deal with multi-view sequential data in a federated environment, which has been modeled and experimentally studied. To the best of our knowledge, this framework is the first to consider both vertical and horizontal diversification in the multi-view setting, as well as their sequential federated learning.