DELTA: Diverse Client Sampling for Fasting Federated Learning

Lin Wang, Yongxin Guo, Tao Lin, Xiaoying Tang

Keywords: federated learning, client sampling

TL;DR: We propose a unbiased sampling method that characterizes the impact of client diversity and local variance, and provide a complete theoretical proof and experimental verification.

Abstract: Partial client participation has been widely adopted in Federated Learning (FL) to efficiently reduce the communication burden. However, an improper client sampling scheme will select unrepresentative subsets, which will cause a large variance in the model update and slows down the convergence. Existing sampling methods are either biased or can be further improved to accelerate the convergence. In this paper, we propose an unbiased sampling scheme, termed DELTA, to alleviate this problem. In particular, DELTA characterizes the impact of client diversity and local variance and samples the representative clients who carry valuable information for global model updates. Moreover, DELTA is a provably optimal unbiased sampling scheme that minimizes the variance caused by partial client participation and achieves better convergence than other unbiased sampling schemes. We corroborate our results with experiments on both synthetic and real data sets.

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