Blockchain-Enabled Privacy-Preserving Second-Order Federated Edge Learning in Personalized Healthcare
This addresses privacy and personalization issues in healthcare federated learning, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing FedCurv and blockchain methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of training personalized models on heterogeneous healthcare data in federated learning by proposing BFEL, a blockchain-enhanced second-order federated edge learning framework based on optimized FedCurv. Experimental results on datasets like Mnist, Cifar-10, and PathMnist demonstrate its efficiency and scalability.
Federated learning (FL) has attracted increasing attention to mitigate security and privacy challenges in traditional cloud-centric machine learning models specifically in healthcare ecosystems. FL methodologies enable the training of global models through localized policies, allowing independent operations at the edge clients' level. Conventional first-order FL approaches face several challenges in personalized model training due to heterogeneous non-independent and identically distributed (non-iid) data of each edge client. Recently, second-order FL approaches maintain the stability and consistency of non-iid datasets while improving personalized model training. This study proposes and develops a verifiable and auditable optimized second-order FL framework BFEL (blockchain-enhanced federated edge learning) based on optimized FedCurv for personalized healthcare systems. FedCurv incorporates information about the importance of each parameter to each client's task (through Fisher Information Matrix) which helps to preserve client-specific knowledge and reduce model drift during aggregation. Moreover, it minimizes communication rounds required to achieve a target precision convergence for each edge client while effectively managing personalized training on non-iid and heterogeneous data. The incorporation of Ethereum-based model aggregation ensures trust, verifiability, and auditability while public key encryption enhances privacy and security. Experimental results of federated CNNs and MLPs utilizing Mnist, Cifar-10, and PathMnist demonstrate the high efficiency and scalability of the proposed framework.