RevFRF: Enabling Cross-Domain Random Forest Training With Revocable Federated Learning

Random forest is one of the most heated machine learning tools in a wide range of industrial scenarios. Recently, federated learning enables efficient distributed machine learning without direct revealing of private participant data. In this article, we present a novel framework of federated random forest (RevFRF), and further emphatically discuss the participant revocation problem of federated learning based on RevFRF. Specifically, RevFRF first introduces a suite of homomorphic encryption based secure protocols to implement federated random forest (RF). The protocols cover the whole lifecycle of an RF model, including construction, prediction and participant revocation. Then, referring to the practical application scenarios of RevFRF, the existing federated learning frameworks ignore a fact that even every participant in federated learning cannot maintain the cooperation with others forever. In company-level cooperation, allowing the remaining companies to use a trained model that contains the memories from an off-lying company potentially leads to a significant conflict of interest. Therefore, we propose the revocable federated learning concept and illustrate how RevFRF implements participant revocation in applications. Through theoretical analysis and experiments, we show that the protocols can efficiently implement federated RF and ensure the memories of a revoked participant in the trained RF to be securely removed.

Automated summary

This article introduces a novel federated learning framework RevFRF and discusses the participant revocation issue in federated learning. By implementing homomorphic encryption based secure protocols, RevFRF can efficiently realize federated random forest and ensure the secure removal of memories of revoked participants in the trained model.