Collaborative Estimating Multiple Gaussian Graphical Models on Resource Constrained Devices in IoT Networks

Ying Zhan, Beilun Wang

Abstract: In recent years, the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted significant interest in smart healthcare. However, such collaborative IoT applications still face three major challenges: multi-task data heterogeneity, high communication cost, decentralized computation and privacy preservation. As a result, efficiently integrating and processing such complex data has become a crucial problem to solve. In this paper, we propose COFFE, a collaborative federated learning framework that allows edge devices to participate in the model training. Our framework leverages the local computing power of edge devices and utilizes the communication resources of the IoT network to enable distributed learning. We apply a compression algorithm which optimizes the communication cost by minimizing the amount of exchanged data between the edge devices and the cloud server. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through a set of experiments on a simulated IoT network. Our results show that our proposed COFFE approach achieves significant performance gains compared to traditional centralized learning approaches. Overall, our work provides a promising direction in smart healthcare for applying federated learning to IoT setting and enabling edge device collaboration.