A survey on federated learning in data mining

Abstract

Data mining is a process to extract unknown, hidden, and potentially useful information from data. But the problem of data island makes it arduous for people to collect and analyze scattered data, and there is also a privacy security issue when mining data. A collaboratively decentralized approach called federated learning unites multiple participants to generate a shareable global optimal model and keeps privacy‐sensitive data on local devices, which may bring great hope to us for solving the problems of decentralized data and privacy protection. Though federated learning has been widely used, few systematic studies have been conducted on the subject of federated learning in data mining. Hence, different from prior reviews in this field, we make a comprehensive summary and provide a novel taxonomy of the application of federated learning in data mining. This article starts by providing a thorough description of the relevant definitions and concepts, followed by an in‐depth investigation on the challenges faced by federated learning. In this context, we elaborate four taxonomies of major applications of federated learning in data mining, including education, healthcare, IoT, and intelligent transportation, and discuss them comprehensively. Finally, we discuss four promising research directions for further research, that is, privacy enhancement, improvement of communication efficiency, heterogeneous system processing, and reducing economic costs.