Serverless Federated AUPRC Optimization for Multi-Party Collaborative Imbalanced Data Mining

To address the big data challenges, multi-party collaborative training, such as distributed learning and federated learning, has recently attracted attention. However, traditional multi-party collaborative training algorithms were mainly designed for balanced data mining tasks and are intended to optimize accuracy (e.g., cross-entropy). The data distribution in many real-world applications is skewed and classifiers, which are trained to improve accuracy, perform poorly when applied to imbalanced data tasks since models could be significantly biased toward the primary class. Therefore, the Area Under Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC) was introduced as an effective metric. Although single-machine AUPRC maximization methods have been designed, multi-party collaborative algorithm has never been studied. The change from the single-machine to the multi-party setting poses critical challenges. For example, existing single-machine-based AUPRC maximization algorithms maintain an inner state for local each data point, thus these methods are not applicable to large-scale online multi-party collaborative training due to the dependence on each local data point. To address the above challenge, we study serverless multi-party collaborative AUPRC maximization problem since serverless multiparty collaborative training can cut down the communications cost by avoiding the server node bottleneck, and reformulate it as a conditional stochastic optimization problem in a serverless multi-party collaborative learning setting and propose a new ServerLess biAsed sTochastic gradiEnt (SLATE) algorithm to directly optimize the AUPRC. After that, we use the variance reduction technique and propose ServerLess biAsed sTochastic gradiEnt with Momentumbased variance reduction (SLATE-M) algorithm to improve the