1. Decentralized Bayesian Learning over Graphs
- Author
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Anusha Lalitha, Xinghan Wang, Osman Cihan Kilinc, Yongxi Lu, Tara Javidi, and Farinaz Koushanfar
- Subjects
FOS: Computer and information sciences ,Computer Science - Machine Learning ,Statistics - Machine Learning ,Machine Learning (stat.ML) ,Machine Learning (cs.LG) - Abstract
We propose a decentralized learning algorithm over a general social network. The algorithm leaves the training data distributed on the mobile devices while utilizing a peer to peer model aggregation method. The proposed algorithm allows agents with local data to learn a shared model explaining the global training data in a decentralized fashion. The proposed algorithm can be viewed as a Bayesian and peer-to-peer variant of federated learning in which each agent keeps a "posterior probability distribution" over a global model parameters. The agent update its "posterior" based on 1) the local training data and 2) the asynchronous communication and model aggregation with their 1-hop neighbors. This Bayesian formulation allows for a systematic treatment of model aggregation over any arbitrary connected graph. Furthermore, it provides strong analytic guarantees on converge in the realizable case as well as a closed form characterization of the rate of convergence. We also show that our methodology can be combined with efficient Bayesian inference techniques to train Bayesian neural networks in a decentralized manner. By empirical studies we show that our theoretical analysis can guide the design of network/social interactions and data partitioning to achieve convergence.