An interpretable client decision tree aggregation process for federated learning

Abstract

Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence solutions are essential in today's data-driven applications, prioritizing principles such as robustness, safety, transparency, explainability, and privacy among others. This has led to the emergence of Federated Learning as a solution for privacy and distributed machine learning. While decision trees, as self-explanatory models, are ideal for collaborative model training across multiple devices in resource-constrained environments such as federated learning environments for injecting interpretability in these models. Decision tree structure makes the aggregation in a federated learning environment not trivial. They require techniques that can merge their decision paths without introducing bias or overfitting while keeping the aggregated decision trees robust and generalizable. In this paper, we propose an Interpretable Client Decision Tree Aggregation process for Federated Learning scenarios that keeps the interpretability and the precision of the base decision trees used for the aggregation. This model is based on aggregating multiple decision paths of the decision trees and can be used on different decision tree types, such as ID3, CART and C4.5. We carry out the experiments within four datasets, and the analysis shows that the tree built with the model improves the local models without federated learning, and outperforms the state-of-the-art.