提出新型联邦聚类方法,支持复杂数据分布下的隐私保护聚类。
A new type of federated clustering: A non-model-sharing approach
- 通过共享中间表示而非原始数据,实现跨机构聚类。
- 单轮通信即可完成聚类,性能接近集中式聚类。
- 适合医疗、金融等需隐私保护的领域使用。
近年来,为利用跨机构的敏感数据,联邦学习(FL)作为无需共享原始数据即可训练模型的去中心化机器学习范式受到关注。然而,现有基于FL的聚类方法通常假设简单的数据划分场景(如水平或垂直分割),难以应对更复杂的分布式结构。本文提出数据协作聚类(DC-Clustering),一种支持混合水平与垂直分割的新型联邦聚类方法。各机构仅共享中间表示,保障隐私的同时实现协同聚类。该方法可灵活选择k-means或谱聚类,且仅需与中心服务器进行一轮通信即可获得最终结果。在合成数据及公开基准数据集上的实验表明,其聚类性能与集中式聚类相当。DC-Clustering填补了当前联邦学习研究中的重要空白,能有效从异构分布式数据中发现知识。其具备隐私保护、通信高效、灵活可配置等实用特性,适用于医疗、金融等隐私敏感领域。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In recent years, the growing need to leverage sensitive data across institutions has led to increased attention on federated learning (FL), a decentralized machine learning paradigm that enables model training without sharing raw data. However, existing FL-based clustering methods, known as federated clustering, typically assume simple data partitioning scenarios such as horizontal or vertical splits, and cannot handle more complex distributed structures. This study proposes data collaboration clustering (DC-Clustering), a novel federated clustering method that supports clustering over complex data partitioning scenarios where horizontal and vertical splits coexist. In DC-Clustering, each institution shares only intermediate representations instead of raw data, ensuring privacy preservation while enabling collaborative clustering. The method allows flexible selection between k-means and spectral clustering, and achieves final results with a single round of communication with the central server. We conducted extensive experiments using synthetic and open benchmark datasets. The results show that our method achieves clustering performance comparable to centralized clustering where all data are pooled. DC-Clustering addresses an important gap in current FL research by enabling effective knowledge discovery from distributed heterogeneous data. Its practical properties -- privacy preservation, communication efficiency, and flexibility -- make it a promising tool for privacy-sensitive domains such as healthcare and finance.
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