MLLGJan 29, 2025

A Survey on Cluster-based Federated Learning

arXiv:2501.17512v11 citationsh-index: 25
Originality Synthesis-oriented
AI Analysis

It offers a structured overview for researchers and practitioners dealing with data heterogeneity in federated learning, but it is incremental as a survey paper.

This paper surveys cluster-based federated learning (CFL) to address challenges in non-IID and heterogeneous data settings, providing a classification, literature review, and alternative use cases for CFL approaches.

As the industrial and commercial use of Federated Learning (FL) has expanded, so has the need for optimized algorithms. In settings were FL clients' data is non-independently and identically distributed (non-IID) and with highly heterogeneous distributions, the baseline FL approach seems to fall short. To tackle this issue, recent studies, have looked into personalized FL (PFL) which relaxes the implicit single-model constraint and allows for multiple hypotheses to be learned from the data or local models. Among the personalized FL approaches, cluster-based solutions (CFL) are particularly interesting whenever it is clear -through domain knowledge -that the clients can be separated into groups. In this paper, we study recent works on CFL, proposing: i) a classification of CFL solutions for personalization; ii) a structured review of literature iii) a review of alternative use cases for CFL. CCS Concepts: $\bullet$ General and reference $\rightarrow$ Surveys and overviews; $\bullet$ Computing methodologies $\rightarrow$ Machine learning; $\bullet$ Information systems $\rightarrow$ Clustering; $\bullet$ Security and privacy $\rightarrow$ Privacy-preserving protocols.

Foundations

The foundational work for this paper's niche, ranked by how specifically the neighbourhood builds on it — not by global fame.

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