Human Activity Recognition Using Federated Learning

State-of-the-art deep learning models for human activity recognition use large amount of sensor data to achieve high accuracy. However, training of such models in a data center using data collected from smart devices leads to high communication costs and possible privacy infringement. In order to mitigate aforementioned issues, federated learning can be employed to train a generic classifier by combining multiple local models trained on data originating from multiple clients. In this work we evaluate federated learning to train a human activity recognition classifier and compare its performance to centralized learning by building two models, namely a deep neural network and a softmax regression trained on both synthetic and real-world datasets. We study communication costs as well as the influence of erroneous clients with corrupted data in federated learning setting. We have found that federated learning for the task of human activity recognition is capable of producing models with slightly worse, but acceptable, accuracy compared to centralized models. In our experiments federated learning achieved an accuracy of up to 89% compared to 93% in centralized training for the deep neural network. The global model trained with federated learning on skewed datasets achieves accuracy comparable to centralized learning. Furthermore, we identified an important issue of clients with corrupted data and proposed a federated learning algorithm that identifies and rejects erroneous clients. Lastly, we have identified a trade-off between communication cost and the complexity of a model. We show that more complex models such as deep neural network require more communication in federated learning settings for human activity recognition compared to less complex models, such as multinomial logistic regression.