Horizontal Federated Learning of Takagi–Sugeno Fuzzy Rule-Based Models

In this article, we elaborate on a design and realization of fuzzy rule-based model in the horizontal federated learning framework. Traditional machine learning in distributed environment often involves sharing sensitive information with other sites or transferring data to a central server on which a global model is trained. These situations increase the communication overhead and pose serious threats to the privacy of sensitive data. Federated learning opens up the possibility for collaboratively training a global model on a basis of distributed on-site data without sacrificing data privacy. While fuzzy rule-based models have been used in system modeling due to their substantial modeling abilities and good interpretability, the implementation of fuzzy rule-based models in a distributed environment without compromising data privacy still requires careful consideration. This article proposes a two-step federated learning approach to train a global model on a basis of private data located across different sites without their centralization. The first step concerns the determination of the structure of the data through federated collaborative clustering. Subsequently, a shared global model is trained jointly by all the participating clients. An advantage of the proposed method is that it achieves high accuracy without violating data privacy. A series of experimental studies are conducted to gain a detailed insight into the realization steps and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.