Effects of Local Data Distortion in Federated Learning

Abstract: This study explored how clients with distorted data affected the Federated Learning process using the FedAvg and FedProx algorithms. Different amounts of the three distortions, Translation, Rotation, and Blur, were tested using three different Machine Learning models. The models were a Dense network, the well-known convolutional network LeNet-5, and a smaller version of the ResNet architecture. The results of the study successfully showcases how different distortions affect the three models. Therefore, they also show that the risk of local data distortion is important to factor in when picking a Machine Learning model for Federated Learning.