Analyzing Federated Learning Aggregation and Distributed Personalization Algorithms Towards Understanding Users’ Residential Electric Load Patterns
Marwan Ghalib, Zied Bouida, Mohamed A. Ibnkahla · 2023
Privacy concerns arise from sharing electric load data. For instance, this data can be hijacked and deductions can be made about building occupancy. Anonymized data does not fully solve the issue, as there have been several successful attempts of re-identifying individuals from anonymized data. Federated Learning (FL) involves training a global model among several clients at the edge without sharing data, but instead, sharing model weights. Besides training a global model to reduce the universal error, it is important to focus on reducing the local error for each client. Personalization helps improve local model convergence without affecting the global model learning process. Therefore, individuals can have a more accurate understanding of their energy usage behavior. It also reduces the number of FL rounds needed for training, which reduces load on the smart grid edge computing resources, communication network, and therefore reduces costs. Previously, research has only looked at stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and Adam for fine-tuning clients’ local models at the edge in the process of FL. This research simulates different FL environments to explore electric load forecasting using different FL aggregation algorithms at the server, as well as seven local optimizers for FL personalization (SGD, Adam, Adagrad, Adadelta, Adamax, Nadam, and RM-SProp). An analysis of the different local optimizer algorithms is also presented.