Federated Learning via Variational Bayesian Inference: Personalization, Sparsity and Clustering

Federated learning (FL) is a promising framework that models distributed machine learning while protecting the privacy of clients. However, FL suffers performance degradation from heterogeneous and limited data. To alleviate the degradation, we present a novel personalized Bayesian FL approach named pFedBayes. By using the trained global distribution from the server as the prior distribution of each client, each client adjusts its own distribution by minimizing the sum of the reconstruction error over its personalized data and the KL divergence with the downloaded global distribution. Then, we propose a sparse personalized Bayesian FL approach named sFedBayes. To overcome the extreme heterogeneity in non-i.i.d. data, we propose a clustered Bayesian FL model named cFedbayes by learning different prior distributions for different clients. Theoretical analysis gives the generalization error bound of three approaches and shows that the generalization error convergence rates of the proposed approaches achieve minimax optimality up to a logarithmic factor. Moreover, the analysis presents that cFedbayes has a tighter generalization error rate than pFedBayes. Numerous experiments are provided to demonstrate that the proposed approaches have better performance than other advanced personalized methods on private models in the presence of heterogeneous and limited data.