A Selective Model Aggregation Approach in Federated Learning for Online Anomaly Detection

Cloud computing has established a convenient approach for computing offloading, where the data produced by edge devices is gathered and processed in a centralized server. However, it results in critical issues related to latency. Recently, a neural network-based on-device learning approach is proposed, which offers a solution to the latency problem by relocating processing data to edge devices; even so, a single edge device may face insufficient training data to train a high-quality model, because of its limited available processing capabilities and energy resources. To address this issue, we extend the work to a federated learning system which enables the edge devices to exchange their trained parameters and update local models. However, in federated learning for anomaly detection, the reliability of local models would be different. For example, a number of trained models are likely to contain the features of anomalous data because of noise corruption or anomaly detection failure. Besides, as the communication protocol amongst edges could be exploited by attackers, the training data or model weights may have potential risks of being poisoned. Therefore, when we design a federated training algorithm, we should carefully select the local models that participate in model aggregation. In this work, we leverage an observed dataset to compute prediction errors, so that the unsatisfying local models can be excluded from federated training. Experimental results show that the federated learning approach improves anomaly detection accuracy. Besides, the proposed model aggregation solution achieves obvious improvement compared with the popular Federated Averaging method.