Ensemble-based Synthetic Data Synthesis for Federated QoE Modeling

Abstract

Quality of Experience (QoE) models need good generalization that necessitates sufficient amount of user-labeled datasets associated with measurements related to underlying QoE factors. However, obtaining QoE datasets is often costly, since they are preferably collected from many subjects with diverse background, and eventually dataset sizes and representations are limited. Models can be improved by sharing and merging those collected local datasets, however regulations such as GDPR make data sharing difficult, as those local user datasets might contain sensitive information about the subjects. A privacy-preserving machine learning approach such as Federated Learning (FL) is a potential candidate that enables sharing of QoE data models between collaborators without exposing ground truth, but only by means of sharing the securely aggregated form of extracted model parameters. While FL can enable a seamless QoE model management, if collaborators do not have the same level of data quality, more iterations of information sharing over a communication channel might be necessary for models to reach an acceptable accuracy. In this paper, we present an ensemble based Bayesian synthetic data generation method for FL, LOO (Leave-One-Out), which reduces the training time by 30% and the network footprint in the communication channel by 60%.